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FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

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Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#21

Post by soneil »

heegemcgee wrote: post #5
Zekio wrote: post #2

1GB distro to display a full screen browser seems a bit excessive Edit: there is a lite version at 557MB, didn't notice at first due to it having two dates in the name

I don't understand the effort here. Making an image implies supporting it; does the author really think it's going to be worth his time to "support" what is surely a couple of bash scripts wrapped up in 600MB of OS? It seems like a simple how-to blog post would have been more appropriate.

They seem to have a goal they've completely forgotten to mention. Moving all the settings into a textfile in /boot means you can bring this up from a windows machine (/boot is fat rather than ext2/3/4 due to limitations in the firmware that seek the bootcode).

So on a windows or mac machine (or pretty much any OS that can handle an SD card in the first place), you can write the image, edit the settings on the card, then stick it in the pi & have it up and running. The methods that most of us would use to do this manually, are near impossible to preflight from an OS that doesn't support ext2/3/4.

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#22

Post by riebschlager »

I'll throw in another "Hey, you could do it THIS way!" You could just make a fullscreen Electron app. [1]

I was just messing around with this on a Raspberry Pi 3 this morning and it works really well.

[1] https://github.com/electron/electron-quick-start

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#23

Post by milkey_mouse »

nkozyra wrote: post #16
NetOpWibby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet, I've been wanting to create an OS on a RasPi, and your project just made it easier. Thanks! I was going to use Electron, but I guess Chromium is good too. I'll have to change some things to make it work with my FeathersJS app.

You were going to make an OS with electron? Can you expound on how you planned to do this?

NodeOS, duh! https://node-os.com/ /s

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#25

Post by NetOpWibby »

nkozyra wrote: post #16
NetOpWibby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet, I've been wanting to create an OS on a RasPi, and your project just made it easier. Thanks! I was going to use Electron, but I guess Chromium is good too. I'll have to change some things to make it work with my FeathersJS app.

You were going to make an OS with electron? Can you expound on how you planned to do this?

Well "OS" was used loosely.

I was inspired by Firefox OS some time ago and found that I could access various parts of the filesystem via nodeJS. My plan is to run my node app and launch Electron fullscreen when the Pi boots.

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#26

Post by Lerc »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #9
CommanderData wrote: post #3

I've achieved this with a few lines of bash on the default Pi distro. I don't really see the benefit unless there's added advantage of Chromium being accelerated? (Last time I checked it was not. Not only that HTML5 Audio was missing too). For anyone interested heres a dirty bash script I had: 1. Auto Login & Disable Screen Blanking: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=18200 , http://elinux.org/RPi…

Sweet, I've been wanting to create an OS on a RasPi, and your project just made it easier. Thanks! I was going to use Electron, but I guess Chromium is good too. I'll have to change some things to make it work with my FeathersJS app.

One of my on-again-off-again projects is this something like this.

https://github.com/Lerc/notanos

There's a quick runthough in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7namj7iy16Y

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#27

Post by punjabisingh »

r3bl wrote: post #15
CommanderData wrote: post #3

I've achieved this with a few lines of bash on the default Pi distro. I don't really see the benefit unless there's added advantage of Chromium being accelerated? (Last time I checked it was not. Not only that HTML5 Audio was missing too). For anyone interested heres a dirty bash script I had: 1. Auto Login & Disable Screen Blanking: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=18200 , http://elinux.org/RPi…

It can be even easier by just autostarting: iceweasel "https://www.google.com" ...and installing something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/r-kiosk/ Or , you can take advantage of this almost two years old bug related to full screen mode: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1049807 It takes ~1 minute for my RPi2 to boot and start IceWeasel, but it gets the job done in the quickest way poss…

That's the setup I have running. Instead of r-kiosk, I've been using mKiosk, which is a more configurable add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/mkiosk/

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#28

Post by NetOpWibby »

Lerc wrote: post #26
NetOpWibby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet, I've been wanting to create an OS on a RasPi, and your project just made it easier. Thanks! I was going to use Electron, but I guess Chromium is good too. I'll have to change some things to make it work with my FeathersJS app.

One of my on-again-off-again projects is this something like this. https://github.com/Lerc/notanos There's a quick runthough in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7namj7iy16Y

Oh wow, this is neat, thanks for sharing! I want to add aspects of Desktop Neo to my OS project because I find it an interesting concept and it seems like the traditional method of desktop computing is undergoing a transition.

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#29

Post by gregmac »

riebschlager wrote: post #22

I'll throw in another "Hey, you could do it THIS way!" You could just make a fullscreen Electron app. [1] I was just messing around with this on a Raspberry Pi 3 this morning and it works really well. [1] https://github.com/electron/electron-quick-start

I was thinking of doing this, with the specific added feature of ensuring the page is displayed, and periodically refreshed.

In case of server returning non-200 response, it should wait a few seconds and refresh. In case of network disconnected (especially when using wifi), same thing - refresh the page.

The periodic refresh is necessary for pages that don't refresh, but even for wallboard-designed content that stays updated, scripts break and things go wrong. The browser itself refreshing is a fail-safe. You should never have to touch these things once they're installed, and that includes doing a hard reboot.

Another nice-to-have feature: turning off the display signal at night (letting the display sleep) and turning it back on in the morning. With computer monitors this is easy, with TVs it probably needs HDMI-CEC, but seems possible.

Re: FullPageOS – A RaspberryPi distro to display a full page browser on boot

#30

Post by mdm_ »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #20
PanMan wrote: post #11

I have experimented a bit with the raspberry pi to drive some TV's around our office. Stock Raspberian OS with different browsers. Unfortunately I was kind of underwhelmed by the performance: tv.giphy.com already is kind of too heavy, and even geckoboard is to heavy to run on a raspberry.. Or am I missing some great performance tweaks?

Just out of curiosity, which Pi have you been using?

Where I work, over the past 2-3 years we've used B+, Pi 2, and Pi 3 (all running Raspbian) for public display screens and browser performance is terrible on all of them. Even the Pi 3 is unable to play YouTube videos without freezing for 10-30 seconds while it buffers and skipping a ton of frames throughout.

If you have video files or use e.g. youtube-dl and then play video back with omxplayer it's nice and smooth (although using the --loop option seems to make the video freeze after several hours/days; memory leak?). Our solution was a 2-line bash script to start a new omxplayer instance when the previous one finishes ad infinitum until you Ctrl+C, and that's run for 7 or 8 months now without a hitch.

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