FullPageOS – Out-Of-The-Box Kiosk mode for the RaspberryPi October 17, 2015

Posted by GuySoft in linux Tags: full screen

Hey all,

Today I am announcing a RaspberryPi operating system that addresses a small need we have – Get the RaspberryPi to display a webpage on full screen with no hassle.

The OS is called FullPageOS. And you can download it here.

Why I built it

A friend of mine, Tailor Vijay wanted something to stream video and add titles to it. Also I was looking for a way to start the RaspberryPi with a browser on full screen for a stats screen at work, and apparently the only thing available is complex guides that only partly work on today’s RaspberryPi.

So what I did last weekend is build a distro based off the code of OctoPi, the 3D printer operating system I built. All this distro does is start Chromium at boot on full screen, with a URL of your choice. The url can be changed conveniently from a text file on the /boot FAT folder. So all you have to do is set the wifi and url via text files, boot, and voilà!

Among the minor tweaking is the elusive setting of disabling the screen from blanking.

How to set it up

What’s nice about FullPageOS is that its simple, no need to install packages, just flash it like any distro, set your wifi and URL settings and boot.

Open the FAT filesystem that is mounted as /boot

on the pi Set the URL you want in the file fullpageos.txt If you need to set up wifi, set your wifi settings with the file fullpageos-network.txt or any way you want are used to on the RaspberryPI Plug to HDMI display, internet and boot

Known issue with black boarders

On some screens I tried FullPageOS I got a black boarder, to fix this, you need to edit config.txt and uncomment the line:

disable_overscan=1

This fixes the issue.

Contribution is appreciated!

FullPageOS works, but its missing the shiny slickness that OctoPi has today. For example if someone wants help me write a nice default boot page that would be great! The current default url is just the github page. So as usual, pull requests are welcome.

The source works just like an OctoPi build, and as a by product I wanted to show how easy it is to create custom distros for the RaspberryPi using this build method. We could, really, build a universal custom distro system based off these things. There is already a variant system that was ported from OctoPi code.

FullPageOS image can be downloaded here

Thanks

Thanks Taior Vijay for inviting me to the Metor hackathon and asking me to set up a webpage in kiosk mode on the Pi.

Thank you Doc’s Tech for hosting the image.

Share and enjoy,

Guy