Canonical has unveiled the first release of Ubuntu Frame, designed for creating Internet kiosks, self-service terminals, information stands, digital signage, smart mirrors, industrial screens, IoT devices and other similar applications. The shell is designed to provide a full-screen interface for a single application and is based on the use of the Mir display server and the Wayland protocol. The developments of the project are distributed under the GPLv3 license. Snap packages are prepared for download.
Ubuntu Frame can be used to run GTK, Qt, Flutter and SDL2 based applications as well as Java, HTML5 and Electron based programs. It is possible to launch both applications built with Wayland support and programs based on the X11 protocol (Xwayland is used). To organize work in Ubuntu Frame with individual web pages or sites, the Electron Wayland program is being developed with the implementation of a specialized full-screen web browser, as well as a port of the WPE WebKit engine. For quick preparation and deployment of solutions based on Ubuntu Frame, it is proposed to use packages in the snap format, with the help of which the isolation of running programs from the rest of the system is organized.
Ubuntu Frame is adapted to run on top of the Ubuntu Core system environment, a compact version of the Ubuntu distribution that comes in the form of an indivisible monolithic image of the base system, which does not use splitting into separate deb packages and uses an atomic update mechanism for the entire system. The components of Ubuntu Core, including the base system, Linux kernel, system add-ons, and add-on applications, come in snap format and are managed by the snapd toolkit. Span components are isolated using AppArmor and Seccomp, which creates an additional frontier for system protection in case individual applications are compromised. The underlying file system is mounted read-only.
To create a customized kiosk limited to the operation of one application, the developer only needs to prepare the application itself, and all other tasks of maintaining the equipment, keeping the system up to date and organizing user interaction are taken over by Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu Frame, including support for control using on-screen gestures on touch screen systems. It is stated that updates to fix bugs and vulnerabilities in releases of Ubuntu Frame will be formed within 10 years. If desired, the shell can be run not only on Ubuntu Core, but also on any Linux distribution that supports Snap packages. In the simplest case, deploying a web kiosk is as simple as installing and running the ubuntu-frame package and setting a few configuration options: snap install ubuntu-frame snap install wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk snap set wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk daemon=true snap set ubuntu-frame daemon=true snap set wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk url=https://example.com
Source: opennet.ru