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Tomasz Jokiel announced today the general availability of Porteus Kiosk 5.4 as the latest stable release of this Gentoo-based GNU/Linux distribution for kiosks and public computers.
Porteus Kiosk 5.4 is here more than five months after Porteus Kiosk 5.3 to bump the kernel version from Linux 5.10 LTS to the latest long-term supported branch, namely Linux 5.15 LTS, which will receive maintenance updates until October 2023. As you can imagine, this means better hardware support and the ability for Porteus Kiosk to run on more devices.
Besides Linux kernel 5.15 LTS, the Porteus Kiosk 5.4 release is here to add implement the import_certificates= parameter for importing DER certificates, add support for dynamically generated remote configurations to allow you to pass Kiosk identification and settings through specific URLs like kiosk_config=https://domain.com/kiosk-config.php?device=nuc&sound=0.3.
Also added in this release is a new cec-client utility that can be used for controlling displays over HDMI interfaces, enables the OpenH264 plugin by default for the Mozilla Firefox web browser, which has been updated to version 91.7.1 ESR, to support WebRTC streams, and enables hardware video decoding for screensaver video and screensaver web page functions.
Among other noteworthy changes, Porteus Kiosk 5.4 reduces the number of initial connections from the client to the Porteus Kiosk Server from 5 to 3 in an attempt to lower the server overhead when booting multiple kiosks at the same time, add a fallback mechanism for graphics drivers if they fail during X.Org Server initialization starting with modesetting and continuing with fbdev and vesa until the desktop is started properly.
Last but not least, the new release no longer allows you to use key combinations that are blocked in the system by default when switching to a secondary keyboard layout. For more details about all the changes included in this update, check out the full changelog. Meanwhile, you can download the ISO images from the official website or by clicking on the direct download link below.
Last updated 2 years ago
