[RndTbl] Public access machine

[Sean Walberg]

A foot in the door for more unpaid work?

OTTOMH:

Your user is publicuser. Store your skeleton in /usr/local/etc/publicuser.

In rc.local or whatever Mint calls it:

rm -rf /home/publicuser
(cd /usr/local/etc && tar -cf - publicuser) | (cd /home && tar -xf -)

In the skeleton's .bashrc

echo "reboot" | at now + 30 minutes

I'd hate to be around when someone is typing an email at T+00:30:01 though.
Maybe a few minutes googling for "linux kiosk" will find a far more elegant
solution. Not sure if you chose Mint because you like it or you have a
particular need, but there appear to be some custom distributions or
packages made for this exact purpose.

This also assumes the user can reboot the computer from the command line. It
works in Red Hat/Fedora.

Sean

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Mike Pfaiffer <high.res.mike at gmail.com>wrote:

>        The CLL is setting up a public access machine in the next couple of
> weeks. It is installed with Mint 8 (a multimedia Ubuntu fork). I would
> like to set up a couple of init scripts. The first will delete the
> public account home directory and copy a "clean" version in its place
> each time the computer starts. The second will shut down the computer
> after half an hour of use.
>
>        I haven't touched on cron since university 20 years ago and I've
> never
> written an init script. Having written a few shell scripts I know the
> copy script should be very simple. I'm not sure how to set up the timer
> script or make them run on start up. Would anybody be able to fire off
> some quick directions?
>
>        This may be a "foot in the door" situation.
>
>                                Later
>                                Mike
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-- 
Sean Walberg <sean at ertw.com>    http://ertw.com/
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