Hello all,
I'm writing an Open Source Internet-Cafe style kiosk system for
public libraries in Ruby. I'm trying to find a gui toolkit that will fit
my needs, and hours of googling have given me little incite. Here is
what it needs to do.

1) Display a login screen for username/password. This screen needs to
take over the entire desktop, and not allow task switching or anything
of the like.

2) A small window or menu applet to let users know how much time they
have left.

3) Small popup alerts when time is getting low.

4) This program needs to run on Linux/KDE and Windows.

Part 1 is what I can't figure out. At first, I was going to use Tk, but
I can't find a way to do it in Tk. Then I was going to use Qt, but I've
found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qt application to run on
windows. Now I'm thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. In particular, code to implement
part 1 would be wonderful.

Thanks for your .
Kyle
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Kyle Hall wrote:

> 1) Display a login screen for username/password. This screen needs to
> take over the entire desktop, and not allow task switching or anything
> of the like.

wxRuby has a Frame#show_full_screen method which will display a Frame
(Window) across the whole screen area without any decorations such as a
title bar. It should be possible to suppress task switching using event
handling. It also has a Timer class.

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org

> Then I was going to use Qt, but I've
> found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qt application to run on
> windows. Now I'm thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.

wxRuby works with native widgets on Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK. It's
straightforward to install (gem install wxruby); no messing around with
extra .dlls or .sos or packages.

> Any suggestions would be appreciated. In particular, code to implement
> part 1 would be wonderful.

require 'wx'

Wx::App.run do
frame = Wx::Frame.new(nil)
frame.show_full_screen(true)
end

hth
alex

On Nov 20, 1:28 pm, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I'm writing an Open Source Internet-Cafe style kiosk system for
> public libraries in Ruby. I'm trying to find a gui toolkit that will fit
> my needs, and hours of googling have given me little incite. Here is
> what it needs to do.
>
> 1) Display a login screen for username/password. This screen needs to
> take over the entire desktop, and not allow task switching or anything
> of the like.
> ...
> Part 1 is what I can't figure out. At first, I was going to use Tk, but
> I can't find a way to do it in Tk. Then I was going to use Qt, but I've
> found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qt application to run on
> windows. Now I'm thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated. In particular, code to implement
> part 1 would be wonderful.

Make sure it handles <ctrl><alt><del> on Windows,
<ctrl><alt><backspace> on Linux, etc.

On Nov 20, 6:28 pm, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I'm writing an Open Source Internet-Cafe style kiosk system for
> public libraries in Ruby. I'm trying to find a gui toolkit that will fit
> my needs, and hours of googling have given me little incite. Here is
> what it needs to do.
>
> 1) Display a login screen for username/password. This screen needs to
> take over the entire desktop, and not allow task switching or anything
> of the like.
>
> 2) A small window or menu applet to let users know how much time they
> have left.
>
> 3) Small popup alerts when time is getting low.
>
> 4) This program needs to run on Linux/KDE and Windows.
>
> Part 1 is what I can't figure out. At first, I was going to use Tk, but
> I can't find a way to do it in Tk. Then I was going to useQt, but I've
> found I will have many problems getting a ruby/qtapplication to run on
> windows. Now I'm thinking of using Ruby/GTK2.
Jan Pilz has created a Windows gem for QtRuby 1.4.9 with everything
you to just install and run, including the Qt libraries themselves.

You can download it from the QtRuby/Korundum RubyForge site:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/korundum/

You could certainly implement your requirements above quite easily in
QtRuby.

-- Richard