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Ask Slashdot: Making a Tablet Run Only One Application?
An anonymous reader asks "I'm working for a medical centre who want to make a tablet with various videos and webpages about smoking cessation available in their waiting room. The tablet can't access the Internet because of security policies. I'm planning to use a local server with copies of the (Creative Commons) videos and pages accessed through local webpages using the tablet's browser. How can I make only the browser be available to the tablet users? Ideas? Suggestions?"
If using Android: create a replacement launcher app, set your new app as the default launcher, and... profit?
I mean seriously - the first time someone thinks they can walk out the door with the tablet, it's gone. Don't think it wouldn't happen.
Why not instead just make a dvd with those videos and print out the text of the websites? You could have a small tv hooked up to a dvd player, have the dvd available to those interested, etc....
It wouldn't be as convenient to steal, and it is a technically easier way to set something like this up. Why are you going to such great lengths to make something more complicated than necessary?
Absolutely. The solutions is a cheap PC running windows, which can easily be configured to allow one and only one app to run at login, and to log off if the application is closed.
Please stop using technology for the sake of technology to increase my already outrageous healthcare costs.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os
The only app that runs is the browser, it is based on gentoo so you can install pam modules to meet your site requirements needs (ldap, kerberos, etc),
And it is designed so you can easily force an enterprise wide os refresh whenever you need/want.
Work bio at MMWD
If the hospital management is being treated well by the tablet manufacturer, then why isn't the tablet manufacturer helping with a solution to lock down the tablet? Surely of anyone they should know best how to lock there own tablets down.
Delete the other applications? Was that the answer?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually, I think the technology he is looking fore here is called a pamphlet, or maybe a DVD player hooked to a tv on a loop.
I don't think that anyone debates how easy it is to steal a bunch of pamphlets. I think it's more about the price of losing a bunch of pamphlets versus losing a tablet.
Is there a reason your organization wants this to be easy-to-steal-and-expensive tablets?
The hospital management is being treated well by the tablet manufacturer, who would very much like this hospital to become the envy of the `non-tablet' hospitals. Plus, it's healthcare; they have money to burn.
The reason the tablet manufacturer is throwing money/product at the hospital is because they know they don't have the right solution but want you to shoehorn it in anyway. Sometimes free is not the best solution.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Glass and plastic are going to hold a lot less disease than the couch you would be sitting on.