Porteus Kiosk Edition v2.0 feedback

[qbicdesign]

Thanks so much for the reply - not sure I'm brave/patient enough to step into unsquashing just yet, but maybe - who knows?
All in all, I'm more than happy with this kiosk, its by far the easiest, most lightweight, and best featured browser kiosk I have tried (and I've tried lots).

A little off topic:
I just bought a Raspberry Pi, and am starting to look into using these as browser kiosks.
Really they're the perfect solution for digital signage or kiosks, as they only cost about €35, you can slap them onto the back of a TV or HDMI monitor and you're done.
There are some tutorials out there already on how to do this with Debian as base, but I was wondering if anyone has played with Porteus on the Pi?

[brokenman]

Thanks for the feedback. It's nice to hear.

Here is what we have on the Raspberry Pi

[brokenman]

Found this writeup for kiosk:
http://community.spiceworks.com/attachm ... reable.pdf

[Ahau]

A quick note on the raspberry pi - Porteus should be booting, but it's not likely to be very fast. I have some optimizations in mind to help out, but right now my focus is on porting Slackware to armv6 hard float. I will use that as a base for a hard float version of Porteus (or use alienbob's armv7 port, but that would cut out support for the pi). That's not quite ready for use by others at this point. I've not started creating a kiosk edition for ARM yet, but there does seem to be some interest around that, so I suppose time and resources will tell.

[qbicdesign]

Found this writeup for kiosk:
http://community.spiceworks.com/attachm ... reable.pdf

Very useful reference for relevant commands. Thanks!
I'm keeping my eye on Spiceworks community activity, but somehow that one slipped under the radar...

[qbicdesign]

@qbicdesign
if you are impatient you can unsquash 003-settings.xzm and just delete squashfs-root/home/guest/.mozilla/firefox/c3pp43bg.default/extensions/{3d7eb24f-2740-49df-8937-200b1cc08f8a} from it and create new ISO.

Found an easy way to do this without unsquahing it myself.
I just ran the wizard from within Linux Mint,
after it reached the section regarding browser options, I navigated to the same folder inside the structure the wizard created
deleted /{3d7eb24f-2740-49df-8937-200b1cc08f8a}
completed the wizard
dd'd the hybrid iso to USB

Its working great!

[pips]

Great work, thank you fanthom!

I think it could be really useful to add the ability to view PDFs using the Firefox viewer or a simple linux utility.

Thank you!

[fanthom]

@qbicdesign
i'm glad to find that manual Kiosk customizations are easy for the users

@pips
kiosk 2.0.2 will be released today and native pdf support (through firefox) is included among other improvements/new features.

btw: Kiosk edition is not only my own work but rather whole team and users contributions.

stay tuned.

[drussell]

First of all, I'd like to say a thank-you and "Nice Work!" to those involved in the Porteus projects, very handy, nice stuff.

For the kiosk edition (currently using 2.02), has anyone come up with a straightforward method to add a simple "logo" screensaver? I don't need anything terribly fancy and hate to start ripping into xscreensaver to try to find something appropriate and make a module or whatever. I just need something to move a bitmap around the screen (even simple Windows XP style, non-panning, non-scrolling, just random pop-up locations for a JPG every few seconds would be perfect) instead of having the screen go blank. I've considered using the auto-exit firefox option to at least show the wallpaper but for this particular installation it is not a "public" facing kiosk, just a locked down appliance for a simple website used for daily reporting by bar/restraunt employees and people may well need to walk away while still in the process of entering data onto the site, etc. so I'd rather not force a firefox exit.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to see this 'feature'...

Any pointers before I try to muck with this myself and undoubtedly come up with a less than optimal solution?

Thanks!

[fanthom]

hello drussell,

maybe instead of going with a real screensaver you could use tweaks included in the wizard:
- put your own custom wallpaper
- disable default screensaver (so monitor wont be turned off)
- enable 'firefox idle shutdown' and set it to few minutes.

this way firefox goes down when unused and displays your wallpaper which acts as a screensaver.
the only disadvantage is that image is static so maybe i'll add a animated gif support to next kiosk release.

[drussell]

maybe instead of going with a real screensaver you could use tweaks included in the wizard
...
this way firefox goes down when unused and displays your wallpaper which acts as a screensaver.
the only disadvantage is that image is static so maybe i'll add a animated gif support to next kiosk release.

The other disadvantage is firefox exits automatically... As I mentioned in my previous post:

I've considered using the auto-exit firefox option to at least show the wallpaper but for this particular installation it is not a "public" facing kiosk, just a locked down appliance for a simple website used for daily reporting by bar/restraunt employees and people may well need to walk away while still in the process of entering data onto the site, etc. so I'd rather not force a firefox exit.

Thanks for the quick reply!

[fanthom]

ok - sorry

so you need a screensaver.

[umineiro]

Hi,

Kiosk Edition is exactly what I needed. Running beautifully. Just wished there was a way to have a printing module installed on it.

[qbicdesign]

My students have found an easy way to "hack" my porteus kiosk.

I have set Porteus Kiosk up with the following:
- set desktop wallpaper
- screensaver off
- start browser fullscreen
- set browser homepage
- browser resets after 10mins of inactivity

we have only a mouse attached, and no keyboard.

Seems that a few of my students have discovered that although the browser is set to start full-screen there is a period of a second or so when the toolbar is visible, the toolbar also has the search option.
I found our info display was showing a random twitter page instead of our school lesson plan. You have to admire the students tenacity, i just wish those particular students would apply it to their studies...

Please can we add an option in the script to completely disable the browser toolbar?
In the meantime - Can I modify the browser launch command so that toolbars and address bar etc are all disabled ? if so how?

Thanks!

[fanthom]

@umineiro
will dig into printing by the time of releasing kiosk-2.1 (approx 3 months from now on) once we fully migrate from dialog based wizard to the web wizard for kiosk.
printer would have to be configured at the wizard stage (hopefully there will be a list of supported models) before creating an ISO and we need a more advanced tool than 'dialog' for this task.

@qbicdesign
smart
will try to find a way to disable this 1 sec delay before toolbar gets hidden.

btw: there is another way of breaking kiosk full-screen mode as described here:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=102&t=2190
will be patching it in porteus-2.0.3 which should be out by next Monday.