Webs’ Random Ideas

This is really more of an update to my project of creating an Internet Kiosk Management Server.

The gist of the project is this: Currently we have a boot CD Linux distribution for Internet Kiosks, or walk up Internet/Email stations at work. What this means is that I have a Boot CD with a fully contained Operating System that runs off the CD. So no hard drive or floppy is needed. The system boots directly into Mozilla Firefox with no other applications or options available to the user.

Sounds wonderful right? Well yes, but I have been running into issues with this current system, called Boothbox. As mentioned in my previous posts on this topic, I have run into issues getting Boothbox to run on Dell Hardware. The problem is Boothbox is based on a really old kernel. And updating the kernel in Boothbox just wasn’t working out for me at all.

So a new system is in store.

I am going to about completely scrap the whole system and start over. What I want, as mentioned in the link above, is a server system. Basically the client loads up from a Boot CD and pulls the kernel and other boot files from the server. The server is an easy to manage Xubuntu distribution; which means updates and/or changes to the software of the clients is easy to manage.

It really is the perfect design as the Boot CD would never need to change or be re-burned when changes need to be made to the client. Anytime you need to update the Kiosk client you just hop on the server, make the changes in the client environment, and then send a command to reboot the clients.

So I decided to use Boothbox for the Client Boot CD figuring there would be nothing I would need to strip out as that distribution already has practically nothing in it. All I need to do is unpackage the Boothbox CD, remove the isolinux boot files, install GRUB Bootloader, and set it up to grab files from the server.

Sounds easy, but I am running into problems with “dpkg-restore“. Something about not being able to lookup the host. This leads to a whole other can of worms. I did some research and found some host and DHCP related config files. I’ve just about gone through them all and nothings helped.

I “chroot” into the Boothbox unpackaged files and run the restore command above. I keep getting the error. From the chroot environment I have tried to ping a hostname like Google, but it fails. Pinging an outside IP address works just fine.

So this is where I’m at. I am planning on having a project webpage up soon. I will post announcements once it is up an running. The plan is to eventually turn this into a distribution that is easily configurable for anyone and is easy to run and manage.