Hello Chris, On Fri, 2013-06-21 at 16:46 +1000, Chris Bouwmeester wrote:
Thanks for this. I didn't go into too much detail because I wasn't really looking to solve the problems via the forum, more to get in touch with someone with appropriate expertise who we can contract to help.
You may still get some contact from a developer. I cannot do that, but I can try to assist with direction.
Lock-down is really only to keep children in their area and disabling some keyboard shortcuts - not BIOS, hardware, etc.
The lock down under Linux can provide what you want, and a lot more besides.
Main question is about running AIR apps - we have 80 flash games built already, so if flash is no longer the way to go, too late.
Flash is not standard, it is not secure, it will change, and there are significant security "holes". I would strongly urge you to change before making any more investment there, throwing away what you have done at this stage would be a lot cheaper than the whole project. It may be possible to make it look like it works, but the foundations are on sand.
I was looking in the direction of Linux (to move away from Windows) because I'm keen to: 1. simplify the whole setup 2. boot faster 3. make the disk footprint smaller and therefore faster to re-image 4. stick with one OS version - at the moment we have XP and W7 and variants of that. 5. have something more stable. For example, we are experiencing a lot of cases where XP just reboots over and over. When we reimage the disk, it is fine.
All of that is good, and as per previous remark, much more besides. Done properly, you can run from read only media, and much less maintenance.
Other thing I forgot to mention is that these are touch screen computers. Don't know if that is something linux allows for. Not sure if my email address appears - bouwmeester.chris@gmail.com Happy to make contact with anyone who might be able to assist us further.
Touchscreen support is around, look at Android. My circumstances mean I am not playing in that area, yet. You might take a look at Cyanogenmod, a completely open and independent redoing of Android. My interest is that it does not come with the extra cruft that the carriers package, I do not need the games on the mobile, nor the spyware. In one sense, yes, you do need a developer, but there will be very pertinent comments from various list participants that can help set the parameters. You might also consider looking at the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone small cheap computers. They run Linux, and some other variants, and can greatly stretch the budget. Regards, Mark Trickett