Multiple monitors on one PC for a KIOSK system

Question

I'm developing a KIOSK system using PHP, HTML5 and Javascript. I want to connect multiple (touch screen) monitors on a single PC. I want these monitors to display a browser in fullscreen-mode where user can access only My Website without any other controls. They won't have mouse or keyboard. They should not be able to minimize the browser. Is there any way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Yes, there is. However there are a lot of questions in your post and I can not all answer off the bat and not in detail anyway. But I can help you break down your problem:

Linux, or rather Xorg supports "Multiseat" which allows you to have multiple active terminals at once. You need to write the xorg.conf file so that there is one configuration for each of the touch screens you want to connect. There should be lots of example configurations for multiseats out there. The pain will be determining the/a unique identifier for each device. I'd start reading here: http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Multiseat

For the multiple instances of a fullscreen non-minimalizable browser without any controls you have to do a few things.

1. Minimizing, maximizing, resizing and all that good jazz has nothing to do with the program (browser) itself but with the window manager. Your problem is, that most window managers are developed to enable moving and resizing, so you need a customizable one. If you know Python I'd like to point you to pyWM http://pywm.sourceforge.net/ which you can use to achieve fullscreen and non-minimizable windows.

2. You need a customizable browser that allows you to have multiple instances at once and remove controls. Firefox can do both using its profile mechanism. What you basically do is you start Firefox and customize it the way you want. Then you create multiple copies of that profile and explicitly tell each terminal to use its own profile. (That's a lot like the xorg problem.)

3. To restrict the browser/Firefox to your site only you have multiple options. A good bet is checking whether the browser has that capability. If not, you definetly can force the browser to use a proxy server, which can impose that restriction on the user. What can be done and what makes most sense depends heavily on your exact setup.

If you have your internet restrictionin place, your browser profiles set-up, your customized windowmanager ready and your Xorg configurations figured out, you can use init to put everything together.