Building a RedHat based kiosk.

[Scott Garman]

Hi all,

Can anyone offer me some pointers to typical changes made to a
"kiosk-like" RedHat system to make it brain-dead simple for users? For
example, I'd like to hide all the details of booting the system, such as
the kernel messages and the init script status output. I'd also like to
do the same on shutdown. Finally, I'd like the system to automatically
log in a user and make it simple for the user to shut down the system
without seeing a multi-option GNOME window which reads "Log Out"
"Reboot" "Shut Down", etc.

Currently I'm using RedHat 8.0 for this with the bare minimum of GNOME
applications. I can automatically log in a user on bootup with a special
GDM config, but the shutting down of the system seems a bit more complex
- for some reason, the GNOME Log Out button and menu doesn't allow any
customization. I'm thinking a bad hack would be to set up sudo to allow
a user to issue "shutdown -h now" and add an icon to the desktop which
does that. But when that's done it's not really exiting the X session
correctly and I'd prefer to do things a better way. 

Let me know if I'm being too vague. The system I'm building isn't really
a kiosk, it's a sound level monitoring station which will be booted and
used often by computer illiterate users, or at best Windows neophytes. 

Thanks,

Scott

-- 
Scott A. Garman                            Unix System Administrator
sgarman at einstein.unh.edu                   UNH Nuclear Physics Group