Coin-operated kiosk written in python -- need some help...

[Jon Monteleone]

Greetings,
I posted a few days back and didnt get much of a response, so I figured I would post again
with more detail. I am running gnome under fedora core 4.

I want a kid to be able to drop a quarter into a coin slot and get 15 minutes of time on
an account that has "restricted" Internet access via the firefox web browser.  We are
experimenting with different ways to allow kids to safely surf the web during school hours
while recovering some of the cost for bandwidth.  I have written a python program that
detects the coin drop and adds 15 minutes to a gui written in tkinter. The gui contains 2
buttons and the usage time.  I need a way for my gui to display from machine bootup until
shutdown and through multiple logins and logouts of the web browsing account.  I am
familiar with kiosk setups but I dont know how to code my python program to display its
gui at the login screen and continue running through multiple sessions of users logging
into and out of the internet acct.

I thought making my kiosk program a daemon would work, but I cant get the gui to display
at the login screen and then there is the problem of having the press of a button on my
gui enter username and password information.

Basically, I envision the following sequence of events...
1) Machine is turned on and boots up
2) My kiosk is started (maybe as a daemon)
3) The daemon uses Tkinter to display its gui with the buttons and time
4) User drops coins and time on gui is incremented
5) User presses the start button
6) My program logs the user into the Internet account
7) Secure firefox is started
8) My program starts counting down the time on the gui
9) When the time reaches 0, the user is logged out
    When the user presses stop on my gui, they are logged out
     The user can drop more coins at any time during the session to prolong the session
10) Timer resets to 0 awaiting the next customer to drop coins

Any help on how to display my gui and log into an account using python would be much
appreciated.
Cheers -Jon