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kasperbs 07-29-2007 07:01 AM

Install Linux & Lock Down Desktop Environment
 
Hi, I don't know how to formulate this question as I'm not really sure what it is I want.

I have an old IBM thinkpad laptop with 300mHz and 128mb RAM, and I would like to use it as kind of a media player for music files. I have about 6gb of harddisk space so fill that up with music files and then play it from there.

The intention would be to place the laptop somewhere central in the house and on bootup it would launch that music player in fullscreen and you would not have access to anything else, maybe only to shut it down.

I have read about people that used this in shops where they sold music so people could enter the shop and listen to some of their music before buying.

I guess it is something about installing a linux distro without any programs like openoffice or anything else. I have read that something with fluxbox could do the job.

So does anyone know how I would go about this, when the pc boots, there will only be the music player running and the shutdown button?

saikee 07-29-2007 07:26 AM

Yep. Just download Slax, run it as a Live CD. It will play your music the way you want it.

kasperbs 07-29-2007 11:15 AM

Thank you very much but it's something else Im looking for
Quote:

The intention would be to place the laptop somewhere central in the house and on bootup it would launch that music player in fullscreen and you would not have access to anything else, maybe only to shut it down.

farslayer 07-29-2007 11:28 PM

KDE's KIOSK mode ?

http://developer.kde.org/documentati...osk/index.html

Gnome has a program called pessulus for locking down the desktop, not sure if it will do what you want or not.
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/

dwhitney67 07-30-2007 10:03 AM

You could always disconnect the keyboard and mouse. Connect the system to your LAN so that you can SSH to it to start/terminate the music app or to perform other system admin tasks.

Hern_28 07-30-2007 10:41 AM

Lightweight.
 
On a 300mhz machine something with kde or genome might not be recommended, would go with fluxbox or another light gui. Have a presario 400mhz with 196 megs of ram and kde and genome are a bit too heavy for it (although they will run, depending on definition of running).

Found slax, dsl, and feather light enough to play video's ok on the system though and you can setup the media player to run at startup as long as you install the to the hd.

You could, however use one of those and create a user, edit his login and delete everything except shutdown options in the menus and add the music player to startup at boot.


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