(Review) - The mission for today’s article is to find a Kiosk Live option that will fit the needs of a small bookstore that wishes to provide a free-to-use PC for their customers. My options that are currently available for this test include Portable Firefox Live, BoothCD and LiveKiosk (Free Edition).

Will it Boot?

Portable Firefox Live: The booting process gave me a verbose display, which is great for me, but it’s likely to scare most people who have no idea what any of what is being shown really means. The provided network was detected, USB keyboard lights up and then fails, standard keyboard works and mouse works, however.

Once the boot process finished, I found that the browser window opens right up, but it displays an annoying alert that a user profile needs to be setup and selected. Definitely not going to float on a public kiosk PC as 99.9 percent of the users will have no idea what to do here. Short of this, the network was detected, USB keyboard lights up and works, standard keyboard works and mouse works as well.

BoothCD: Based on DSL, the verbose boot process was very smooth. Browser window opened up nicely to a blank page. There was no homepage selected in the default ISO of this distribution, but I don't think this is going to be a huge issue though. As with the previous distribution, the network was detected, USB keyboard lights up and works, standard keyboard works and mouse works, too.

LiveKiosk: I was shocked to see that there was no verbose boot-up, but knowing that this is targeting the commercial market, I can see why they might decided to take this route. Once it finished booting, the browser window opens up to the LiveKiosk homepage.

LiveKiosk appears to be using a customized version of Firefox, as the find, text size and search options are not what I’m used to seeing on the top of my browser as they were displayed here. And of course, the network was detected, USB keyboard lights up and works, standard keyboard and mouse work as well.

Click here to get the latest prices on Linux distributions!

Next