xpud.org
You put this fast-booting live distro on a thumbdrive or disc, and it boots straight into a kiosk mode where you have just a full-screen browser that is restricted to your web-based sales portal. Perhaps it is simply an online store catalog with shopping cart and checkout.
Let's say you sell products at various fairs or conventions - maybe you travel a lot - wouldn't it be nice to be able to turn any cheap, old computer with a network connection (maybe you have many of them) into a fully-functioning on-site store in under 10 seconds without having to mess with anything? Just plug in that USB drive, boot, remove the USB drive, and you're done (or you do the same for a set of machines). If someone kicks out a power plug, just reboot like you did the first time and relax, knowing that the same exact functionality will be available on every computer you run this on, every time, with nothing to configure, nothing to install, and leaves no footprint on any of the machines you touch (runs completely in memory).
If needed, this fast-booting kiosk distro could download config settings from your web service (maybe you want to change your prices or catalog depending on the computer's location).
Could something like this reduce the cost and hassle of running profitable vendor kiosks at fairs/festivals/shows/conventions/malls/lobbies? Enough to be worth paying for such software?
What are the implications of instantly deployable, domain-specific thin-clients along these lines? What are the risks? Or is this just backward thinking?
You can't trust the hardware or the network, for one. Did you check for a hardware keylogger?
* Network connectivity * Computers (& physical considerations: space and tables) * Web store
Those are the hard things to implement, and would cost a business a fair chunk of money, even for a bare bones offering of those.
(1) What does "compatible with most major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora" mean? It's a separate distro, right? I've never heard of one distro being "compatible" with another.
(2) Does the "media player" play DVDs?
We don't want to handle the package dependencies, so we just leverage APT/dpkg. When running mkxpud, it reads project config (called cookbook), parse it into package settings (called recipe), strips directly from a working Debian/Ubuntu Linux, extracts them into root filesystem and finally generates image. </blockquote>
Probably not, since that's technically illegal.
It depends on the type of DVD you use. If for instance it's a movie DVD using something like CSS (remember DVD Jon?) and you access it's content by breaking the CSS "protection" then you're right. Basically if you need specific codecs or circumvent certain "protection" layers it would probably be something that you might want to check with a legal expert. In any other case where you want to access a plain DVD, AFAIK this is completely legal anywhere in the world.
http://moblin.org/documentation/test-drive-moblin
It boots from nothing to a working desktop in 8 seconds. Wow!
Acer Aspire 4730z Intel Pentium dual core T3400 (2.16GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache) 732MB Mobile Intel Graphics 2GB DDR2 RAM
Using the USB boot, version xpud-0.8.9
wifi didnt work with my Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter 802.11b/g/draft-n but i havent had a chance to fiddle with it.
this concept is a good one, but it is obviously still in infancy and has a long way to go. I will personally be watching this distro closely to see where they go
one thing that concerns me, where on earth is the community?
Couldn't get Wifi to connect, and a lot of missing features.
Very interesting though, could be perfect for quick kisok-style applications as well as a quick boot loader - looks like the plan allowing other OS's to be booted into from it.