The OPACs at HLT have been failing one by one, so some replacements are in order.  The previous OPACs ran Mozilla in kiosk mode on a hand modified Debian install sufficiently rickety that after ~4 years I didn’t really want to touch it.

Somewhat surprisingly, the task (taking some hardware and netbooting it into a teenage-vandal-proof web kiosk) didn’t appear to be a solved problem – there are still a lot of people rolling their own, I’ve done that once, I didn’t really want to do it again.

Webconverger almost fits the bill, with a couple of caveats: (more…)