How to edit a Webconverger LiveCD ?

On August 8, 2008 · Leave a Comment

What is Webconverger ? From the website : “Perfect for public access Web kiosks, safer Internet Banking or just simply surfing the Web.” – http://webconverger.com/

I’ll be using this software to setup a public access web kiosk where clients will be able to subscribe to newsletters, browse our product catalog etc…

This is how it started :
My initial goal was to find a ready-to-use product to convert a pc into a tamperproof, webbrowser-only kiosk. I looked around for software and/or instructions to completely lockup the windows-os, but while surfing around the www it came to me that either people didn’t succeed to lock windows down completely or you had to buy some kind of software to do the job… Not an option… Further a long the way I recalled that we still had some older pc’s in our stock without windows license, used in the past as linux-servers for various applications… Linux èh… Why not look around for some linux-based sollution…

Passed by some abandoned projects (that seemed promising though, but development stopped already a while ago), got frustrated, passed by some other stuff… and then… YIPEE, I found what I was looking for ! WebConverger !

What it does : 2 options : boot from CD or boot from an USB stick – no HD needed (HD install is not even supported at this time, though it looks like it’s in the pipeline. After booting the linux-kernel and X it starts up firefox. And firefox only. If you try to close it, you end up with another firefox window Just the way it should be. There’s also a time-out after which the browser resets itself to the homepage. The CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to a console don’t work either.

Customization is done via bootparameters such as homepage, http_proxy, keyb etc…
The USB-stick version uses Syslinux to boot, editing is fairly simple, just edit the menu.cfg file in the syslinux folder after you wrote the image to a stick.

The CD-version is more difficult. You have to edit the ISO file to achieve this. And that’s the tricky part. I started of with WinISO on windows and ISO-MASTER on linux to do some testing. Without any luck though. After starting up a freshly build cd, it would either hang on ‘Loading stage 2′ or show the grub loader and stop.

The solution : use UltraISO (trial edition will do) to edit the menu.lst file in the folder grub – As per default, the file is read-only when you extract it, don’t forget to make it R/W – Before putting it back on the cd, I suggest to put it back in R/O mode (don’t know if this is necessary). Burn the changed ISO to a cd from within UltraISO, load it into the pc your are going to use and… THERE YOU GO