Then we can move onto starting X (and loading kiosk.sh). When you’re done there, Control+X to exit and run sudo chmod +x /opt/kiosk.sh to make the script executable. We want them to start with a clean environment every time. This in incredibly important for kiosk computing because you never want a user to be able to affect the next user. It also needs to wipe the Chrome profile so that between loads you aren’t persisting stuff. This is going to be what loads Chrome once X has started. I know we’ve only been going for about five minutes but we’re almost done. This part is optional and many kiosks won’t need sound but I’ve had a lot of comments about it: sudo usermod -a -G audio $USER Step 3: Loading the browser on boot This will allow PulseAudio to start up and manage sound for applications. We also need to make sure your user is in the audio group. If you omit -no-install-recommends you will pull in hundreds of megabytes of extra packages that would normally make life easier but in a kiosk scenario, only serve as bloat. Sudo apt install -no-install-recommends xorg openbox google-chrome-stable pulseaudio Then update our packages list and install: sudo apt update We’ll start by adding the Google-maintained repository for Chrome: sudo add-apt-repository 'deb stable main' A lightweight window manager to enable Chrome to go fullscreen.X (the display server) and some scripts to launch it.We obviously need a bit of extra software to get up and running but we can keep this fairly compact. Later releases should have nmtui which will make this easier but until then you always have man nmcli :) Step 2: Install all the things It’ll go something like this: sudo apt install network-manager If you don’t or want to change to wireless, this is the point where you’d want to use nmcli to add and enable your connection. The installer auto-configures an ethernet connection (if one exists) so I’m going to assume you already have a network connection. You can either SSH in (assuming you’re networked and you installed the SSH server task) or just log in. At the end when tasksel ran, opted to install the SSH server task so I could SSH in from a client that supported copy and paste!Īfter you reboot, you should be looking at a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ubuntu tty1 login prompt.Set my username to user and set an hard-to-guess, strong password.I just accepted the defaults and when asked: Burn it to a USB stick, boot the kiosk to it and go through. Just follow the installation instructions. ![]() Sidebar: If you’ve never tested your kiosk’s hardware in Ubuntu before it might be worth download the Desktop Live USB, burning it and checking everything works. I would suggest 64bit if your hardware supports it and I’m going with the latest LTS (14.04 at the time of writing). It’s all the nuts-and-bolts of regular Ubuntu without installing a load of flabby graphical applications that we’re never ever going to use. I’m picking the Server flavour of Ubuntu for this. Update: If you’ve already installed, read this companion tutorial if you want to convert an existing Ubuntu Desktop install to a kiosk. The whole thing takes less than 2GB of disk space and can run on 512MB of RAM. ![]() XBMC for a media centre, Steam for a gaming machine, Xibo or Concerto for digital signage. Of course you could load any standalone application. It could be interactive or just an advertising roll. The website could be local files on the kiosk or remote. We’re going to be running a very light stack of X, Openbox and the Google Chrome web browser to load a specified website. Hopefully we’ll do better than the image on the right. I’m going to show you how and it’s only going to take a few minutes to get to something usable. Single-purpose kiosk computing might seem scary and industrial but thanks to cheap hardware and Ubuntu, it’s an increasingly popular idea. Thursday, 24 July 2014 kiosk security ubuntu Building a kiosk computer with Ubuntu 14.04 and Chrome - Oli Warner Oli Warner About Contact Oli on Twitter Subscribe Building a kiosk computer with Ubuntu 14.04 and Chrome
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