The Raspberry-Pi that used to run the member & volunteer sign-in kiosk has been replaced with a Lenovo ThinkCentre labeled labrat that has a burnt-out SATA controller. labrat currently boots from an Ubuntu persistent-liveUSB. Firefox runs on startup in kiosk mode and is locked to the member & volunteer sign-in airtable form via policies.json.

labrat is kept in its acrylic box to prevent random passerbys from pulling cables or the liveUSB. The keys for the padlock are kept in the key lockbox behind the front desk and are labeled “Sign-in Kiosk”

When labrat boots, Firefox will run in kiosk mode on startup. Kiosk mode forces Firefox fullscreen, hides all menus, and disables the F11 hotkey. This is achieved by creating a startup application in Ubunut with the command firefox -kiosk. Firefox can still be closed in this mode with the Alt + F4 keyboard shortcut.

Firefox is further limited by policies.json. Documentation for policies.json can be found here. policies.json is stored in /etc/firefox/policies. That is a protected directory; to edit or move the file you will need to invoke sudo.

There is a desktop shortcut to relaunch Firefox in kiosk mode, or you can run the firefox -kiosk command in the terminal.

If labrat encounters a problem that requires rebooting, be aware it may require you to remove the liveUSB before it will fully shut down. It also may take up to 15 minutes to reboot.