Gentoo-Based Porteus Kiosk 5.3 Released with Hardware Video Decoding, Virtual Keyboard

Porteus Kiosk 5.3

Tomasz Jokiel announced today the release of Porteus Kiosk 5.3 as the latest version of this Gentoo-based GNU/Linux distribution designed for kiosk and other public computers.

Porteus Kiosk 5.3 is here about six months after Porteus Kiosk 5.2 to add several new features, including experimental hardware video decoding support and virtual keyboard for both Mozilla Firefox ESR and Google Chrome web browsers.

While the hardware decoding feature can be enabled in remote config with the hardware_video_decode parameter, the virtual keyboard feature comes as an extension and will pop-up automatically when clicking an input field on a web page. Users can control the virtual keyboard in remote config with the virtual_keyboard parameter.

Porteus Kiosk 5.3 also adopts the libinput library as default input driver since it provides native touch gestures support for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. To preserve compatibility with existing systems running Porteus Kiosk 5.2 or lower versions, the evdev’driver is still supported.

Other noteworthy changes include the ability to relocate on-screen buttons to a different position on the kiosk screen, support for the ‘sound open firmware’ package as an alternate sound driver, updated Administration Panel in Porteus Kiosk Server, as well as updated dns_server= parameter to also support DHCP configurations.

Last but not least, Porteus Kiosk 5.3 completely removes the Adobe Flash Player plugin from the system. If your existing kiosk system still uses standalone flash apps, these will still be supported through Porteus Solutions’ customized builds service.

This release is powered by Linux kernel 5.10.73 LTS and includes the Mozilla Firefox 91.2.0 ESR and Google Chrome 93.0.4577.82 web browser. All the included packages have been updated to Gentoo’s portage snapshot 20211014.

You can download it right now from the official website, where you’ll find an installation image for Porteus Kiosk, as well as for the Porteus Cloud, Porteus ThinClient, and Porteus Server editions.

Last updated 2 years ago

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