Hey Folks, I've made a couple kiosks in the past around the house, but I'm hoping there's an easier solution out there. Previously I'd install raspbian or something on to a pi and then remote into a full-screened chromium to set it up.

Does anyone know of a good OS that theoretically boot directly to a URL with minimal effort? Like I said I can do it manually but I'd like something pre-built for the task.

Bonus points if it would have a web-configurator, I may want to change the URL it's using occasionally and it'd be nice not to have to remote in directly.

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[–] frap129@lemmy.maples.dev 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know of an OS or distro dedicated to this, but it should be pretty easy using cage-kiosk, a window manager that only allows for a single window, and cog, a very basic web app container.

Install cage and cog on whatever distro you want, setup autologin, then in your ~/.profile add something like

cage -- /usr/bin/cog https://example.com

It should boot directly to the webpage at that point. Make sure to set up ssh before you do all this! System management might get tricky if you dont

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, is there an install guide? I looked over their wiki and I can't find anywhere that says "so here's how you install this"

[–] frap129@lemmy.maples.dev 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If your doing this on a pi with raspian, both of these packages should be available. You can run sudo apt install cage cog in a terminal to install both of them.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 points 11 months ago

Oh. Well that's simple then. From their docs it didn't sound like it was in the repos. Cool then!