The Porteus Kiosk 5.2.0 distribution has been released, based on Gentoo and designed for equipping standalone internet kiosks, demo stands, and self-service terminals. The bootable image of the distribution is 130 MB (x86_64).
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 carried out through a special wizard that is integrated with the installer and allows the preparation of a customized distribution version for placement on USB Flash or a hard drive. For example, you can set a default homepage, define a whitelist of allowed sites, set a password for guest access, specify an inactivity timeout for ending the session, change the background image, configure the browser layout, add additional plugins, enable wireless support, set up keyboard layout switching, etc.
During boot, system components are verified against checksums, and the system image is mounted in read-only mode. Updates are automatically installed using the mechanism for creating and atomically replacing the entire system image. Centralized remote configuration of a group of standard internet kiosks is possible with network-based configuration loading. Due to its small size, by default, the distribution loads entirely into RAM, significantly increasing operational speed.
In the new release:
- The software versions are synchronized with the Gentoo repository as of March 14. This includes updates for packages with Linux kernel 5.10.25, Chrome 87, and Firefox 78.8.0 ESR.
- Porteus Kiosk 5.2 has been announced as the latest release with the ability to use Adobe Flash Player, and future versions of browsers will be delivered without Flash plugin support.
- The package 'libva-intel-media-driver' has been added, implementing the Video Acceleration API (VA-API), which provides a unified interface to hardware acceleration mechanisms for video encoding and decoding.
- The interface for remote desktop access Remmina has been rebuilt with support for server CUPS printing to enable local printers to be redirected to remote systems through RDP sessions.
- The ability to move bookmarks on the bookmarks bar and home button has been disabled (the content of the bar and home page is defined solely through the configuration file). Dragging URLs to the tab bar to create a new tab is also prohibited.
- The Shift+F9 and Shift+F12 key combinations, which provide access to storage inspection modes and tools for people with disabilities, have been blocked.
Source: opennet.ru
