I work part time at a library as a member of the IT team. We have 12 kiosk computers throughout the library that are dedicated to the catalog. They are currently running Windows 7 with Firefox and 3 add-ons that lock the thing down to only allowed websites (the web-based catalog itself and a few other things specific to us). The setup works OK, except that the only scripts I can find to re-launch Firefox any time it gets closed slow the system to a crawl, and updates are a pain. We image the machines from a master, which currently takes 30-45 minutes since the image is over 20 GB.
I have been playing with Linux for a couple of years now, specifically Ubuntu, and have found it to be a wonderful alternative to Windows, especially in a situation like the one I just described above. I have created a kiosk using Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS minimal install and installing xorg, openbox, and Firefox with the same 3 add-ons that only takes 1.4 GB of disk space. It is very secure, and if someone closes Firefox it reopens almost instantly, all at blazing fast speed. The best part is that it only takes a whopping 3 minutes to image all the kiosks. Overall, it works well, with one tiny exception:
Our catalog system allows patrons to log in and see their account, and even manage it to some extent. The login / logout links work fine in Windows and in the Unity and LXDE desktop environments, but not on the kiosks with just Openbox and Firefox. In that environment, the link is not active (not click-able).
So here (finally) is my question: What am I missing? I don't want any of the other functionality of a desktop - I want the patrons to be able to browse the allowed sites in Firefox ONLY. No ability to do anything else at all.
menu.xmlto only have that option. I don't understand what people are logging in and out of, however. Surely not the Openbox session..? And what is the non-active link?