Power interruption reboot for unattended kiosk

maxsanders · 03-05-2006, 10:04 AM

I place information kiosks in public places for non profit health/wellness education. Typically I write the material in Flash (Swish, actually) and have it autoload in a windows environment. I hope to run future kiosks w Linux. I have several linux problems, most pressing is the ability for the system to autoboot and autoload after a power interruption. I use Knoppix, and other Live CD distros, but dont know how to get it to autoload/autoboot.
BTW: I will be glad to help anyone with inexpensive kiosk design.
Many thanks!

davcefai · 03-05-2006, 01:38 PM

Assuming that the computers are relatively recent models there should be a BIOS setup setting to restart after a power failure.

So if you set this up and set up to boot from CD you should be OK.

I have a Pentium 2 350MHz running NT Server which is set up in this way.

maxsanders · 03-06-2006, 05:39 AM

Thanks. I can set the bios as you describe. Are you suggesting that I have my flash presentation on the CDROM or my compact Linux distro (DSL..Knoppix) on the cdrom? What i am getting at is...how do I autoload autoplay the presentation? Max

johnnybhoy67 · 03-06-2006, 05:47 AM

Ahh that's a simple shell script my good man. Problem is you may have to remaster the distro/update the ISO boot script to do it.

I don't know how to do it off hand but there will be others here who can describe how it's done and I beleive it's not that difficult.

Cheers

J

davcefai · 03-06-2006, 08:08 AM

This now all depends on the setup you have.

Since you mention that you are using Windows, this presupposes a Hard Disc. If you install Linux on the Hard Disc then all you need is a startup script. Probably in init.d. Never tried it on Linux myself but hordes of people must have.

If you want to run the whole show from CD then, as said above, you will need to re-master the CD to include the startup script. There are instructions around on how to do this.