Hi I just moved from Gnome to KDE (fresh install). I’m looking for advise/pointer/solution on the following: use my laptop as a “web tv” for other family members. (Laptop will be connected to a tv monitor). To this end:
I want to have a dedicted user for the “kiosk” mode
I want to autologin to such user
I want to autostart only brave (or firefox) full screen
The kiosk user not entitled to run anything: no panels, launch of dolphin, konsole etc. Ideally closing the browser should logout the user
Not able to store anything: no downloads/bookmarks (I now already how not to have cookies and history)
Anybody tried this or where should I look to? I assume in kde autologin and autostart app is a piece of pie. The problem I see is to avoid “kiosk” accessing applications, and have the user in “read only” (not able to write on disk)
In Plasma, you can add new users from the System Settings application, it’s near the bottom of the left-pane list under the “System” category. There are only two options for “Account Type” though: Administrator and Standard. Would be nice if there was a more locked-down option, as you desire. Guess you’ll need to set it to the former whilst setting it up.
Autologin settings are now in System Settings → Colours & Themes → Login Screen (SDDM) — click the Behaviour button above the image selection.
→Took me a while to find that!
Autostart, likewise in System Settings - in Plasma6, most things are now here.
I’d suggest a containerized version of Firefox/Brave and lock its permissions down. (I’m not familiar with Flatpak or AppImage but believe this can be done).
Remove the panel; you might also want to remove keyboard shortcuts associated with programs or actions you don’t want to run. I’m not sure how one would initiate auto-logout with a browser though; some programs do offer it (I think Kdenlive does) so it’s worth investigating how.
You could set Firefox or Brave to send downloads to eg. /dev/null …?
All I can think of for now (and you likely know at least some of it anyway).
Firefox supports kiosk mode that shows pages in full screen without browser chrome, context menus, and other features useful for typical desktop browsing. These can be seen on ATMs or information panels where users are not expected to interact with the rest of the system.
Hi All,
I picked up from all the suggestions above. Many thanks community!!!
This is what I did:
created user “kiosk” as standard user
set up autologin for kiosk (both points can be done in KDE System Settings)
optional: set up my wlan and vpn usable for all the users
reboot (only to check autlogin works fine)
in System Settings set autostart firefox (know I’m the user kiosk)
open konsole
chmod 555 of all visible directories (I kept all the “invisble” dirs as they were)
chmod 555 . (home dir also readonly)
cd .config/plasma-workspace/env
create a file whatevername.sh
edit the file and insert one line: export KDE_HOME_READONLY=1
run menu editor and remove all the applications → menu wil be empty
Solution need improvements:
a) a user knowledgeable of linux knows how to acces “.dirs”, that are still not protected
b) I still need to find a way to “lock” bookmarks
c) only menus are empty, all installed app still can be run from “start”, if one know the names
… I’m lucky, nobody else has knowldge in the family of unix/linux … for now solution is acceptable!
