Kiosk OS?

Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 13 points –

Hey Folks, I've made a couple kiosks in the past around the house, but I'm hoping there's an easier solution out there. Previously I'd install raspbian or something on to a pi and then remote into a full-screened chromium to set it up.

Does anyone know of a good OS that theoretically boot directly to a URL with minimal effort? Like I said I can do it manually but I'd like something pre-built for the task.

Bonus points if it would have a web-configurator, I may want to change the URL it's using occasionally and it'd be nice not to have to remote in directly.

6

I don't know of an OS or distro dedicated to this, but it should be pretty easy using cage-kiosk, a window manager that only allows for a single window, and cog, a very basic web app container.

Install cage and cog on whatever distro you want, setup autologin, then in your ~/.profile add something like

cage -- /usr/bin/cog https://example.com

It should boot directly to the webpage at that point. Make sure to set up ssh before you do all this! System management might get tricky if you dont

Thanks, is there an install guide? I looked over their wiki and I can't find anywhere that says "so here's how you install this"

If your doing this on a pi with raspian, both of these packages should be available. You can run sudo apt install cage cog in a terminal to install both of them.

Oh. Well that's simple then. From their docs it didn't sound like it was in the repos. Cool then!