Hi!

I need to create a custom kiosk based on openSUSE/KDE. I did this before, but with the help of some scripts, at the time of KDE 4.2.

Now i would like update those kiosks to use KDE SC 4.4 and wonder if is now possible to start a plasma session in readonly mode so after a user used and messed up with plasma an X restart will suffice to get everything in place again.

Any ideas?

You likely just need to make all the various variables in the plasmarc, plasma-desktoprc and plasma-desktop-appletsrc files immutable. However, this may completely lock down the Plasma desktop so no changes can be made at all though.

Personally, I think I would do like this:

1. Make sure the desktop is set up as it should be.
2. Copy the files to a location where the user(s) only have read-access. If there are several computers involved, probably a NFS-share.
3. Make like bcooksley suggested (locking down the Plasma desktop seems like a good idea in a kiosk setting if you ask me).
4. When the users login, a script copies those files back into their proper place.

Not being able to made modifications to plasma is fine. The steps i'd like to do are:

1 create an appliance and run it untill it is configured perfectly
2 add a script that ask me how much the session should last (operator logs in the users)
3 lock down plasma and the kde session to be the very same at every login, so when the script kills the session it is the same as before fot the next user

4 clone the appliance and install it on every machine

Is there any documentation on what variable to touch to lock the plasma session (aka users can't unlock plasmoids)? I really miss kiosktool!

Unfortunately KioskTool hasn't been revived for KDE 4 yet.

You can however make the settings groups immutable, I believe 4.4 will honor all keys that Kicker honored.