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Gentoo-based Porteus Kiosk 5.2 was announced today by developer Tomasz Jokiel as the latest release of this GNU/Linux distribution optimized for web kiosks.
It’s been about five months since the release of Porteus Kiosk 5.1, and Porteus Kiosk 5.2 is here as the second major update to the Porteus Kiosk 5.0 series announced last year in March bringing an updated kernel from the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS branch.
Linux 5.10.25 LTS is present in the Porteus Kiosk 5.2 installation images, which adds a new layer of hardware support to the kiosk-oriented distro. Basically, this means that you should now be able to install Porteus Kiosk on hardware where it wasn’t possible using previous releases.
In addition to the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, the Porteus Kiosk 5.2 release updates the VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) stack and adds the libva-intel-media-driver package to pave the way for hardware accelerated video decoding, which should become reality with the next major release, but only on selected GPUs. This feature will mostly benefit digital signage solutions.
Among other changes, Porteus Kiosk 5.2 adds support for the CUPS printer server to the Remmina remote desktop client so you can redirect local printers to RDP sessions, replaces the GPaste clipboard manager with Parcellite and improves support for VNC conncections in the Porteus Kiosk Server “Premium” edition.
Various functionality that was available in previous releases was disabled by default in the new release. This includes the ability to drop a URL on the bookmarks toolbar, home button, as well as the tabs bar.
It also blocks the use of the Shift+F9 and Shift+F12 keyboard shortcuts by default, which were used for opening the Storage Inspector and Accessibility Inspector consoles respectively, in the Firefox web browser, and disables update notifications on Chrome instances used for playing the screensaver video.
Porteus Kiosk 5.2 ships with both the open-source Mozilla Firefox 78.8.0 and the closed-source Google Chrome 87.0.4280.141 web browsers. You can download this release right now from the official website as Porteus Kiosk, Porteus Cloud, Porteus ThinClient, or Porteus Server editions.
Last updated 3 years ago
