I'm not sure what to call what I want, so I'll just describe what I want to do.What I'm doing is setting up an old laptop, with gentoo, for my kids. I want to have some program on there that, with a password, gives access to do homework, to play games for 30 min, watch netflix for an hour, etc. I can't imagine that there already exists a program that can do that, but it would be less work for me if there was. So I will have to make this launcher program. My question is this, after I make such a program, how do I make it so this program is running at start up and no other programs can be ran from any menus or anything. I have not decided which window manager to use yet. Is there a lite window manager that would help me accomplish this task?
Custom access/launcher
window manager
I wouldn't bother trying to write a new launcher. Just configure your startup scripts to do what you need:Model the different tasks as different users on the gentoo box: usenetflix, playgame etc.,Use a X Display Manager to create a nice login screen. I'm sure you can find variants that will let you create big friendly icon for all your tasks.In the ~/.Xsession file, don't even start a Window Manager. Just directly launch whatever application you want that task account to use.Finally, to get the autologout behavior, also in each .Xsession, use the at command to call the appropriate log off script. This SuperUser answer has links to good stuff depending on your environment.So you might have something like this in your /home/usenetflix/.Xsession (double check syntax, I haven't tested this):#!/bin/shecho /etc/X11/xdm/Xreset | at now + 60 minutefirefox netflix.com &Now, nothing is going to prevent your child from just click on Netflix again at the login screen unless you add a little more smarts there, say touching a .lastlogin file and checking that to see if it should allow startup to continue. But you should be able to get everything you need without having to write a line of code.