HowTos for the desktop

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. [FIXME: doesn't work. Upgrade restores default desktop icons]

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.

Changing kioskmode on diskless workstations

After you have made changes to the kioskmode settings with kiosktool like described above, you will have to copy some files inside the chroot used by the diskless workstation.

Assuming the diskless workstations are running i386, the following commands must be executed on the workstation server(s):

export LTSPCHROOT=/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/
cp -rv /etc/kde-profile/ $LTSPCHROOT/etc/
cp -v /etc/kderc $LTSPCHROOT/etc/
cp -v /etc/kde-user-profile $LTSPCHROOT/etc/
unset LTSPCHROOT

Else replace i386 with amd64 or powerpc as applicable.

Disabling kioskmode

If you don't want to use kioskmode, either just remove the file /etc/kderc. Or, if you just want to temporarily disable kioskmode, comment out all entries in there.

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 from backports.org.

There are three requirements to do so:

Package: flashplugin-nonfree
Pin: release a=etch-backports
Pin-priority: 999

Sound with Flash in thin clients

You need to install this as root:

and make one change in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/ etch-test local

And that followed by aptitude update and aptitude install flashplayer-nonfree-extrasound

remeber to remove deb http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/ etch-test local from source list after that and run aptitude update again.

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 do the following:

# install the debian-keyring securily:
aptitude install debian-keyring
# fetch the debian-multimedia key insecurily:
gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.pca.dfn.de --recv-keys 1F41B907
# check securily if the key is correct and add it to the keyring used by apt if it is:
gpg --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg --check-sigs 1F41B907 && gpg --export 1F41B907 | apt-key add -
# add repository to sources.list - please check the homepages for mirrors!
echo "deb http://debian-multimedia.org etch main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# update the list of available packages:
aptitude update