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Gentoo-based Porteus Kiosk, a portable, small and secure locked down GNU/Linux distribution designed to deploy a kiosk software on public access computers, has been updated to version 5.0.
It’s been more almost six months since the last Porteus Kiosk release and the team lead by Tomasz Jokiel proudly unveiled today a new major series of the Gentoo-based operating system that lets you transform a computer into a versatile and flexible kiosk system.
Porteus Kiosk 5.0 includes major software upgrades, starting with the kernel, which has been updated to the long-term supported Linux 5.4 series. Linux kernel 5.4.23 LTS is included in this first release of the 5.0 series, adding better support for newer hardware and many other benefits.
On top of that, this new release ships with both the Google Chrome 80.0.3987.122 and Mozilla Firefox 68.5.0 ESR web browsers. The Firefox browser now supports viewing of TIFF files, which requires the enable_file_protocol=yes parameter to be set in the kiosk configuration.
Among the new features implemented in Porteus Kiosk 5.0, the first run configuration wizard now lets you set custom mouse acceleration, as well as different number of seconds for each tab of the default browser that is displayed on the kiosk screen.
A remote NTP server is now used to set the system clock, which ensures the correct time is being displayed on kiosk systems that aren’t reboot regularly, and support for starting a kiosk session without using a physical keyboard is now available thanks to a new virtual keyboard.
This release also adds support for setting the volume level for all audio devices present on the kiosk system and improves VNC (Virtual Network Client) connections by implementing a -noxdamage flag in the x11vnc startup script.
A 60-second timeout was implemented as well when using the halt_idle= parameter to prevent the kiosk system from shutting down. Also, it looks like the Citrix standalone application now works correctly.
Images: Porteus Solutions
Last updated 4 years ago
