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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

#31

Post by rcarmo »

Did a similar thing a few years back, with playlist support and uzbl as the browser (which is much faster and lighter than chromium) and omxplayer to play/stream full screen video.

Just a Python script with playlist support, really:

https://github.com/sapo/digital-signage-client

We eventually gave up on using Pis due to lack of decent hardware acceleration on the browser (still missing, BTW) and I then built this:

https://github.com/sapo/android-signage-client

Plenty of videos and samples at both links.

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

#32

Post by CommanderData »

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…

Works well, Iceweasel has better HTML5 support on the Pi than Chromium.

Though struggled getting Iceweasel to start in full screen from command line, afaik there no flags, one way was to close in fullscreen state or install a plugin. Further IW shows first run dialogs. Annoying if your deploying several Pis, then theres the cursor which unclutter package helps to solve. Lastly matchbox x uses less ram than LXDE which was important in my use case.

Chromium is better if you want to seamlessly deploy Pi's without spending too much time configuring them, theres a trade off somewhere - the official Chromiums package is old and IW is newer with less API.

You may want to consider wrapping your command inside the while loop in the script above. I added did this after I experienced IW and Chromiums unexpectedly closing sometimes. Helped alot.

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

#33

Post by kriro »

A bit disappointed since I read the headline (it has distro in the headline somehow my brain stopped at xxxxOS) and thought it was an OS developed from scratch (I was ready to get impressed by writing/porting a browser for it as well). Alas it seems to use Raspbian. Still a fun project but I'd probably tackle that with a startup script or something.

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

#35

Post by GuySoft »

Alupis wrote: post #8
heegemcgee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It requires you provide it with a zipped Raspbian image. It takes that image, and injects a few scripts, and configures them to run at boot. Here's the scripts: https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS/blob/devel/src/fullpag... https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS/blob/devel/src/common.... https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS/blob/devel/src/config

Indeed, its what lets us release a new version in OctoPi within hours of announcements on raspberrypi.org. I am also working on adding other devices support using Armbian.

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

#36

Post by GuySoft »

kevincox wrote: post #17

This would be fantastic if it supported automatic updates. I want to forget about the machine and just have a webpage on the screen.

Can you be more specific what needs to be updated? OctoPrint does something like that using pip packages.

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

#38

Post by jsingleton »

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…

I used to do the same [0], quite a while ago now, until I discovered Screenly Open Source Edition [1]. There are a lot of tweaks to get right, and it does video, images and web pages. I made a fork with basic authentication to the web administration interface [2], in case the network is not private.

This project does look interesting though. Last time I did this the Pi was a bit underpowered for some JavaScript heavy dashboards and the Wi-Fi was really flaky. Perhaps the Pi 3 has fixed these things but I haven't tried it.

[0] https://shutdownscanner.com/blog/posts/Raspberry-Pi-Digital-...

[1] https://www.screenlyapp.com/ose

[2] https://github.com/jpsingleton/screenly-ose

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

#39

Post by jsingleton »

I wonder if something based on RISC OS [0] would be more lightweight and boot quicker? I believe NOOBS is based on this and it loads very quickly. Linux is great but Raspbian may be overkill for something like this.

[0] https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

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

#40

Post by kevincox »

GuySoft wrote: post #36
kevincox wrote: post #17

This would be fantastic if it supported automatic updates. I want to forget about the machine and just have a webpage on the screen.

Can you be more specific what needs to be updated? OctoPrint does something like that using pip packages.

Well security updates mostly. Something like how ChromeOS handles them would be user nice (maybe a scheduled reboot time to apply)
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