Porteus Kiosk 5.2.0 distribution kit, based on Gentoo and intended for equipping stand-alone Internet kiosks, demonstration stands and self-service terminals, has been released. The distribution boot image is 130 MB (x86_64).
The base assembly includes only the minimum set of components necessary to run a web browser (Firefox and Chrome are supported), which is curtailed in its capabilities to prevent unwanted activity on the system (for example, settings are not allowed to be changed, download / installation of applications is blocked, only access to selected pages). Additionally, specialized Cloud builds are offered for comfortable work with web applications (Google Apps, Jolicloud, OwnCloud, Dropbox) and ThinClient for working as a thin client (Citrix, RDP, NX, VNC and SSH) and Server for managing a network of kiosks.
The setup is carried out through a special wizard, which is combined with the installer and allows you to prepare a customized version of the distribution for placement on a USB Flash or hard drive. For example, you can set a default page, define a white list of allowed sites, set a password for guest login, define an inactivity timeout to end a session, change the background image, customize the browser design, add additional plugins, enable wireless network support, configure keyboard layout switching, etc. .d.
During boot, system components are verified by checksums, and the system image is mounted in read-only mode. Updates are installed automatically using the mechanism of formation and atomic replacement of the entire system image. It is possible to centrally remotely configure a group of typical Internet kiosks with configuration download over the network. Due to its small size, by default, the distribution is loaded entirely into RAM, which allows you to noticeably increase the speed of work.
In the new release:
- Program versions are synchronized with the Gentoo repository as of March 14. This includes updated packages for Linux kernel 5.10.25, Chrome 87 and Firefox 78.8.0 ESR.
- Porteus Kiosk 5.2 is announced as the latest release with the ability to use Adoble FlashPlayer; in the future, versions of browsers without support for the Flash plug-in will be supplied.
- Added the βlibva-intel-media-driverβ package with the implementation of the VA-API (Video Acceleration API) software interface, which provides a unified interface to hardware acceleration mechanisms for video encoding and decoding.
- The Remmina remote desktop interface has been rebuilt with CUPS print server support to provide the ability to redirect local printers to remote systems via an RDP session.
- The ability to move links to the bookmarks bar and the home button is disabled (the contents of the panel and the home page are determined only through the configuration file). Also, dragging a URL onto the tab bar to create a new tab is not allowed.
- The Shift+F9 and Shift+F12 combinations, which provide access to the storage and tools inspection modes for people with disabilities, have been blocked.
Source: opennet.ru