Revival of an Oldie but Goodie: Kiosk’s Possible Return?

“With the release of KDE 4, Kiosk sadly fell into a state of
limbo. Now, however, KDE developer Ian Geiser wants to bring it
back to life on KDE 4.

“If you’ve never used KDE’s Kiosk and you work in a setting
where it could be useful, it’s well worth giving the old version a
try if you’ve got a spare machine. Depending on your situation,
using a distribution that’s locked down with the KDE 3.x Kiosk tool
might be quite sufficient and secure. Even if it’s not something
you’d prefer over the long term, it’s a neat project and well worth
some exploration now.

“The Kiosk administration panel prompts systems administrators
to create new accounts (and profiles) for the Kiosk deployment.
Each profile can be locked down easily, through the graphical
interface, allowing the administrator to restrict not only
applications, but options within those applications. Can these
things be done without the interface, singularly, by hand? Yes,
yes, they can, and as I admitted earlier, I spent way too much time
doing so. I did a good job, in the end, but believe me when I say
the Kiosk tool was faster, easier, and thought of more areas that
needed locking down than I did straight away.”

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