Cory Hall Kiosk
At the time of this writing, the EECS
department has five publicly-accessible information kiosks -- 4 in
Soda Hall, and 1 in Cory Hall. The Cory Hall kiosk was set up using
Windows NT and Netscape Navigator, and is managed by CUSG.
Links for our kiosk:
-
Cory Hall Kiosk Homepage
-- this is the home page for our kiosk. It's a simple directory, with the
(large) image of Cory Hall as the background.
-
Cory Kiosk Homepage
+ Navigation bar -- this will open both the kiosk homepage and our
navigation bar. Use this link from the kiosk, if the navigation bar disappears.
Try this link to see how our kiosk works.
-
Jumpstart the Kiosk
-- this will close the current window, and open the proper window and navigation
bar. Use this link from the kiosk, if the navigation bar becomes wedged.
If you select this link (and your home page is not the kiosk's home page),
you will be prompted to close your current window. This link will
show you how our kiosk really looks.
Details of the Kiosk setup:
-
We started with a standard installation of Windows NT Workstation 4.0,
installing TouchWare for Windows NT (MicroTouch
Systems, Inc.) driver for the touchscreen, and Netscape Navigator.
-
Set the Windows taskbar to auto-hide. Under Control Panel | Display
| Appearance, choose the Scrollbar item, and increase its size to about
30 for touchscreen use.
-
Configure NT to auto-logon to a local kiosk account (use TweakUI, or Autolog.exe
from the NT Resource Kit).
-
Set the default homepage for Netscape, and limit surfing to .berkeley.edu
domain, by setting up HTTP proxy server info as detailed elsewhere
by Andrew Mutch.
-
Install the screensaver WINEXIT.SCR from the NT Resource Kit, and configure
it to log the user out after, say, 15 minutes idle time. Since we're
set for auto-logon, this will quickly result in a fresh start back at the
homepage.
-
To go straight into Netscape, and eliminate seeing the desktop during each
login, change the default shell as detailed here
by Tim Kambitsch. Note that runapp.exe is available in the Windows
2000 Resource Kit; I copied it from a machine with the W2KRK installed,
to the C:\winnt\system32 folder of our kiosk. Our default shell becomes:
runapp.exe C:\Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\Program\netscape.exe
-P"default" -sk
This will use the default Navigator profile, and make Navigator full-screen,
eliminating the toolbars as well as the window controls.
See also here
for info on using javascript to make a "super-kiosk" page (exactly what
I use in the Jumpstart the Kiosk link above).
Last modified 5/22/2025.