Unidata
support for running just one application in full screen mode(kiosk mode)
Currently one can access all the workspace and the Desktop GUI, would be nice to have just one GUI application to be running in the KIOSK or a full screen mode.
Thanks for the kind words; I was starting to think that I was perhaps the only one who was interested in this project :).
Kiosk mode would be great; the confounding factor is that the current light-weight windows manager I'm using (fluxbox) doesn't provide a 'universal' kiosk mode. You can still achieve this, if your GUI program supports it, via the optional start.sh file. This might look something like this:
#start.sh
#!/bin/bash
/path/to/my/program --kiosk-mode
If your intended program doesn't support a kiosk-mode natively, there are tools out there like wmctrl that allow you to issue commands to windows in an X environment. I haven't adapted it to any of my projects, yet, and it would make the start.sh file a little more complicated, but it would be doable. Once I've gotten it sorted out, I imagine I will add a tutorial/example for using it.
If you use a start.sh file, incidentally, remember you don't need to do anything special to make it run. The bootstrap.sh script that manages the VNC/etc stack will also execute start.sh, if one is found.
Thanks again for the kind words!
I am working on creating an eclipse environment, so without given users access to whole system utilized/window manager, would like to just expose the IDE...
These are two links which are closest approach for enabling kiosk mode without application's fullscreen mode support.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/kioskFluxbox
http://blogs.wcode.org/2013/09/howto-boot-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-fullscreen-browser-kiosk/
That is tricky; this project spawned from the https://github.com/Unidata/cloudidv project. I wasn't able to find a satisfactory solution at the time and ultimately decided "These are scientists, and they're in a sandboxed environment, this is the risk I'll take". I see how your situation is different.
I recently discovered an extremely light-weight Windows Manager that seems like it could fit the bill for a kiosk mode. It is called Ratpoison, available here. I played with it briefly before I had to shift gears. Screenshots here and here. It seems like this WM, configured judiciously to enable/disable various key combinations for switching programs, would work well. I just haven't had time to pursue this, yet. If you do, please feel free to share :).
For that matter, I don't use eclipse very often, but if you had a way to start it maximized, and then could disable alt-tab for window switching, you might be halfway there.
I suppose I'll need to sort out how to lock down a fluxbox environment and then provide a tutorial. CloudStream is a natural fit for kiosk-mode applications.
Specifically its for the omnet++ a network simulator IDE. Thanks for suggesting the lightweight DE
This is a good conversation but I doubt I'll have an out-of-the-box solution in short order. I've created an issue, https://github.com/Unidata/cloudstream/issues/6 to track progress on actually implementing universal kiosk mode, with a link to a guide I found that might prove useful.