kiosk-browser

Ubuntu package to set up a system as a kiosk browser. Release announcement and example foto can be found on my blog at http://blog.schlomo.schapiro.org/2012/09/dashboards-made-easy.html.

This package disables the regular GUI and installs a browser-only GUI.

The behaviour can be customized in /etc/default/kiosk-browser:

Set KIOSK_BROWSER_START_PAGE to set the start page(s).
Set KIOSK_BROWSER_PORTS to autoconfigure these|this display ports (Use xrandr port names)
Set KIOSK_BROWSER_XRANDR_EXTRA_OPTS to rotate some displays or have other custom xrandr settings.
Set KIOSK_BROWSER_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT to the amount of seconds after which the systems reboots if the screen did not change. Default is 3600. Set KIOSK_BROWSER_WATCHDOG_CHECK_INTERVAL to the check interval in seconds, default is 17 (too much for slow systems like Raspberry Pi)
Add custom initialization commands or pull the above configuration from somewhere else.

The package is licensed under the GNU Public License, see included LICENSE.txt for full license text.

Building

Install fakeroot, lintian and dpkg.
Checkout this github repo and type make.
In out you should find the resulting .deb package file.

Installation

Install the .deb package from out
Create /etc/default/kiosk-browser and set KIOSK_BROWSER_START_PAGE
Reboot the system

If you want to play with the settings without rebooting the system you can use this command to restart the kiosk browser:

sudo service nodm stop ; sudo pkill -u kiosk-browser ; sleep 5 ; sudo service nodm start

The reason for this hack is that nodm does not kill all sub-processes on shutdown.

Notes

This package disables all inputs in the X server so that nobody can mess with your system or use it as an entry point into your network.

Customisation

Multi-Monitor Support

kiosk-browser supports setting up multiple monitors with different browser windows. The implementation is somewhat tricky so that I would be happy to get some feedback on it.

The above mentioned KIOSK_BROWSER_* variables can be all Bash Arrays and multi-monitor support is enabled by setting these variables to arrays. In each array the same position refers to the same display, for example:

KIOSK_BROWSER_PORTS=(HDMI1 HDMI2)
KIOSK_BROWSER_XRANDR_EXTRA_OPTS=("" "--rotate left")
KIOSK_BROWSER_START_PAGE=( 
    http://blog.schlomo.schapiro.org
    http://go.schapiro.org/schlomo
)

Note the empty ("") array value which means no extra xrandr options for HDMI1. For single monitor operations you can still use these variables to configure the display, e.g.:

KIOSK_BROWSER_PORTS=VGA
KIOSK_BROWSER_XRANDR_EXTRA_OPTS="--rotate left"
KIOSK_BROWSER_START_PAGE=http://blog.schlomo.schapiro.org

If you don't know if the VGA port is called VGA or VGA1 you can specify a substring and the scripts will use the first connected port that matches. Here we basically use the fact that a Bash String is exactly the same as a Bash Array with a single value in it.

Chromium Preferences

The chromium profile is wiped on each start. To set chromium preferences you can use the master_preferences mechanism and create a /usr/lib/chromium-browser/master_preferences file with preferences. For example I use

{
    "profile" : {
        "default_zoom_level" : 2.22390108574155
    }
}

to set the zoom level to 150%. This allows us to have dashboards that look fine both on my desktop and on the kiosk browser.

Show more than one page

Sometimes a dashboard should cycle between several views. I think that this should be done on the server side, not the client side. For example, create on your web server a file named urls.js like this with the URLs in it:

    var urls = [ 
            "http://www.schapiro.org/schlomo/publications",
            "http://www.schapiro.org/schlomo/videos"
            ];

And next to it another file with the HTML code, named dashboard.html:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
    <head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="urls.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    
    function start() {
            setInterval(function(){cycle()},60000);
            cycle();
    }
    
    var counter = 0;
    function cycle() {
            var iframe = document.getElementById("iframe");
            iframe.src=urls[counter++];
            if (counter >= urls.length) {
                    counter = 0;
            }
    }
    
    </script>
    <style type="text/css">
    body,iframe {
            padding: 0px;
            margin: 0px;
    }
    #wrap { position:fixed; left:0; width:100%; top:0; height:100%; }
    #iframe { display: block; width:100%; height:100%; }
    </style>
    <title>Dashboard switcher by Schlomo Schapiro</title>
    </head>
    <body onload="start()">
    <div id="wrap"><iframe id="iframe" src=""/></div>
    </body>
    </html>

Finally, adjust KIOSK_BROWSER_START_PAGE in /etc/default/kiosk-browser to point to this dashboard.html and you are done.

e-ihrke/kiosk-browser