HowTos for the desktop

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KDE Kiosk mode

Two default profiles are included:

debian_edu_pupils (enabled for members of the students file group)

debian_edu_root (enabled for the root user and members of the admins file group)

Note:: modifications to the profiles can be done using kiosktool. However, unless you follow the step below, your changes will be overwritten by upgrades.

If you want to modify the kiosk profiles, you can either copy the existing ones and modify them, or create new kiosk profiles in (for example) /etc/kde3/kioskprofiles/ and enable them in /etc/kde-user-profile. The kiosk tool will do this for you if you click "profile properties" and browse to a new folder.

If you don't want to use kioskmode, disable it in /etc/kderc or /etc/kde-user-profile. (FIXME: in which of the two?!)

Modifying the kdm login screen

In Debian/Etch, the way to customize the kdm login screen was changed. Now, it is done by adding a file in /etc/default/kdm.d/ specifying variables to override the default.

Here is one example used to activate the theme in the desktop-base package:

USETHEME="true"
THEME="/usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/debian-moreblue"

See the code in /etc/init.d/kdm for information on how these variables are used.

Flash

To install the Adobe Flash Player web browser plugin, install the flashplugin-nonfree debian package. You need to have non-free enabled in your sources list. It requires a working Internet connection and will download the precompiled binary from Adobe.

Sound with Flash in thin clients

If sound doesn't sound properly in thin clients when browsing certain pages (as youtube.com), it can be solved installing a package in the thin clients server. To do it, login as root in the server:

/!\ Warning: The software you install has no trust path. Software installed with apt-get is cryptographically signed to ensure a trust path.

wget http://pulseaudio.vdbonline.net/libflashsupport/libflashsupport_1.0~2219-1_i386.deb

Then:

dpkg -i libflashsupport_1.0~2219-1_i386.deb

To get the sound working, you also need the latest flashplugin-nonfree package installed (23st of Jan: 9.0.115.0.1~etch1).

Other useful plugins

After adding the multimedia repository (see below):

apt-get install mozilla-mplayer mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins

Playing DVDs

libdvdcss is needed for playing most commercial! DVDs. For legal reasons it's not included in Debian (Edu). If you are legally allowed to use it, you can use the packages from debian-multimedia.org. Add the multimedia repository and install multimedia and dvd libraries:

apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs

Using the multimedia repository

To use www.debian-multimedia.org visit the homepage and find a mirror, or just add

deb http://debian-multimedia.org etch main

to your sources list. Eventually install key package for multimedia (debian-multimedia-keyring).