OPAC Stations — Windows(TM) kiosks no more!

In the process of helping one of my libraries come up with a (very) cheap kiosk solution, I ran across WebConverger. It’s nothing new, the real revelation to me was the relative ease with which WebConverger can be customised. It’s actually very easy to do. Much easier than I was anticipating, especially if you have a shred of linux command line experience.

We wanted a kiosk solution that went to our catalog web page by default on boot. WebConverger doesn’t (usually) allow you to specify a URL besides their default, but you certainly can customize the ISO to make it your own. Here’s what we did:

Using WebConverger 7.2, we did the following:

Downloaded the original WebConverger ISO

Don’t bother trying to do this on Windows or OSX. You’ll just end up mad.

On a linux box (preferably one you can install packages to, I used Debian Lenny):

1. Make sure you have mkisofs (sudo apt-get install mkisofs) and syslinux (sudo apt-get install syslinux) installed
2. mkdir /mnt/webc
3. mount -o loop webc-7.2.iso /mnt/webc/
4. rsync -av /mnt/webc /mnt/custom
5. chmod +w /mnt/custom/webc/isolinux/live.cfg
6. Now edit /mnt/custom/webc/isolinux/live.cfg and change the boot command line with your homepage URL.
7. Now rebuild the ISO like so:

mkisofs -o /tmp/custom-webc.iso -b -r -J -l
-cache-inodes -allow-multidot -no-emul-boot
-boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \ -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat /mnt/custom/webc

Burn the ISO to CD, and go at it.

All done! Wasn’t that easy?