Release of Porteus Kiosk 5.0.0, a distribution for equipping internet kiosks

Prepared the release of the distribution Porteus Kiosk 5.0.0, based on Gentoo and designed for equipping standalone internet kiosks, demonstration stands, and self-service terminals. The bootable image of the distribution only 50MB and works more accurately than 104 MB.

The basic build includes only the minimum set of components necessary to run a web browser (Firefox and Chrome are supported), which has limitations to prevent undesirable activities in the system (for example, changing settings is not permitted, downloading/installing applications is blocked, and access is limited to selected pages). Additionally, specialized Cloud builds are offered for comfortable web application usage (Google Apps, Jolicloud, OwnCloud, Dropbox) and a ThinClient for functioning as a thin client (Citrix, RDP, NX, VNC, and SSH) and Server for managing the network of kiosks.

Configuration is performed through a special wizard, which is integrated with the installer and allows you to prepare a customized version of the distribution for installation on USB Flash or hard drive. For example, you can set a default homepage, define a whitelist of allowed websites, set a password for guest access, establish an inactivity timeout to end the session, change the background image, customize the browser's appearance, add additional plugins, enable wireless network support, configure keyboard layout switching, etc.

During boot, the system components are verified using checksums, and the system image is mounted in read-only mode. Updates are installed of automatically using the mechanism of creating and atomically replacing the entire system image. Centralized remote configuration of a group of standard internet kiosks is possible with configuration loading over the network. Due to its small size, by default, the distribution is loaded entirely into RAM, which significantly increases performance. Program versions are synchronized with the Gentoo repository (20201004).

In new release:

• Software versions synchronized with the Gentoo repository (20190908).
  graphics stack components, including new releases of Mesa 19.2, X.Org Server 1.20.5, and libdrm 2.44.99 that were tested in Ubuntu 19.10. Fresh versions of video drivers for Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA chips have been added (including the proprietary NVIDIA driver 435); Package versions, including Linux kernel 5.4.23, Chrome 80.0.3987.122, and Firefox 68.5.0 ESR.
• An interface has been added for setting the mouse pointer speed;
  
• The ability to set different intervals for sequential tab switching in kiosk mode has been added;
  
• Support for viewing TIFF images in Firefox has been added, through converting TIFF format to PDF;
• Daily synchronization of system clocks with a remote NTP server has been ensured (previously synchronization occurred only at reboot);
• A virtual keyboard has been added to the session password input window, allowing a session to start without a physical keyboard connection;
• The ability to adjust sound levels separately for each audio device has been implemented;
• The user has 60 seconds to make a decision before the system shuts down when using the 'halt_idle=' parameter;
• The ‘-noxdamage’ flag has been added to the x11vnc startup script to prevent VNC crashes.

Source: opennet.ru