Inclusion and development - the Meilix Internet kiosk

Speaker: Tarun Kumar

Track: Debian Blends

Type: Short talk (20 minutes)

An internet kiosk is a special use case. A single computer is shared by an indefinite number of users. Lots of security concerns arise. In Asia and elsewhere multiple non-latin languages have to be supported. We decided to create a custom lightweight distribution, Meilix and a generator web app that allows you to preconfigure an ISO with the wallpaper and desktop settings in place.

Here in India I study as an undergraduate computer science and engineering but I was thrilled to work with a grant of Fossasia on the Meilix (“Mei” means roughly “nice”) project for several months. In this talk, we will get into the challenge to build our own customized Kiosk. You will also understand the workflow of the project and the best use of Travis CI and Github infrastructure. We use Flask framework to design a basic webapp named Meilix-Generator for the user to go there and provide their configuration and build their distro. We deploy the webapp on Heroku. We took the most common approach to a project which gives a GUI to customize our own Linux Distro with LXQT as a desktop environment, which is implemented first time ever. I will explain what steps we take to make internet access more inclusive and exciting for everyone and what steps we undertake to add conversational interface features.

This talk can have any type of audience, one can be a school student or a employee. After the talk, one can generate its own operating system with its desired configuration and distribute it too.