Web based Linux distro

chrisnharvey · 02-23-2011, 01:33 PM

Hello,

This is my first post so please forgive me if it's in the wrong place.

I am hoping to develop a Linux distro that is based entirely on Firefox as a frontend but with a local LAMP server running within firefox to create a GUI based on PHP, HTML5, JavaScript etc.

I can do all the PHP, MySQL, HTML things myself, but I was wondering how I could create a fullscreen Firefox that launches at boot and can not be closed with ALT+F4 and has no context menus at all. I don't know what X Window Manager to use and how to integrate this into an installable distro that I can provide to some friends to test. I hope to base this distro on Debian.

Also, would it be possible to use an iframe within Firefox as a web browser. For example, if a link's target is _blank or _top, instead of opening another fullscreen firefox window or replacing the HTML/JS desktop with a webpage, could this call a JavaScript function of mine instead?

I know this is a difficult project, but any advice would be great!

Thank you,

- Chris

dugan · 02-23-2011, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrisnharvey

I was wondering how I could create a fullscreen Firefox that launches at boot and can not be closed with ALT+F4 and has no context menus at all. I don't know what X Window Manager to use...

Have your X login manager launch the web browser instead of a window manager.

For getting Firefox the way you want it, you will want to look into XUL scripting.

Personally, I think it might be preferable to write a custom web browser. This isn't as hard as it sounds because Qt gives you classes to create an application with webkit functionality:

http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qtwebkit.html