This post is a work in progress. I’ll update it as I tweak the solution.
Last Wednesday I was helping a friend build a Kiosk. We tried to follow https://thepcspy.com/read/building-a-kiosk-computer-ubuntu-1404-chrome/ but it didn’t work. It turns out between using the wrong version of ubuntu (16.04 instead of 14.04) and doing it in a virtual machine, we were all messed up.
There has to be a better way.
There is a secret to debian/ubuntu packages. If you aren’t trying to get them included in debian/ubuntu, you can break most of the rules and get them to do whatever you want. I figured I should be able to use this and make creating a kiosk as easy as apt install kiosk
TL;DR: you can try this by running these two commands on a new ubuntu-server installation:
add-apt-repository ppa:evarlast/kiosk apt install --no-install-recommends kioskme
The rest of the post describes how I did this.
First, I’m going to create a new PPA on launchpad just for this, so that a user can `add-apt-repository ppa:evarlast/kiosk`
I visit https://launchpad.net/~/+activate-ppa and fill in the fields with kiosk and click activate.
Next, I start a new deb. I may as well build it from source. There might be a better way, but I’ve gotten to know dh (debhelper) a bit, so I’m going to use it.
$ mkdir kioskme ; cd kioskme
$ cat > Makefile
build:
<tab>echo noop
install:
<tab>install -d 755 ${DESTDIR}/usr/bin
<tab>install -m 755 kioskme ${DESTDIR}/usr/bin/kioskme
^D
$ cat > kioskme
#!/bin/bash
xset -dpms
xset s off
openbox-session &
start-pulseaudio-x11
while true; do
rm -rf ~/.{config,cache}/chromium/
chromium-browser --kiosk --no-first-run 'http://duckduckgo.com'
done
^D
Now debianize this script directory using dh_make:
dh_make -p kioskme_0.0.0 --createorig -s
Now customize the deb with a service, preinst for user creation and some dependencies:
$ cat > debian/service [Unit] Description=kioskme [Service] Type=simple Restart=on-failure User=kioskme Group=kioskme ExecStart=/usr/bin/startx /etc/X11/Xsession /usr/bin/kioskme ^D $ cat > debian/preinst #!/bin/sh set -e . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule case "$1" in install|upgrade) if ! getent group kioskme >/dev/null; then addgroup --system kioskme >/dev/null fi if ! getent passwd kioskme >/dev/null; then adduser \ --system \ --disabled-login \ --ingroup kioskme \ --gecos kioskme \ --shell /bin/false \ kioskme >/dev/null fi mkdir -p /var/log/kioskme chown kioskme:kioskme /var/log/kioskme setfacl -m u:kioskme:rw /dev/tty0 /dev/tty7 ;; abort-upgrade) ;; *) echo "preinst called with unknown argument \`$1'" >&2 exit 1 ;; esac # dh_installdeb will replace this with shell code automatically # generated by other debhelper scripts. #DEBHELPER# exit 0
Alright, maybe that preinst is a bit big. I copy it around and fill it out like a template for services I put into debs.
Now edit the debian/control file to add dependencies, change the section to utils, fill in whatever else you want, set Depends to look like this:
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, Xorg, openbox, chromium-browser, pulseaudio
Now create the deb:
fakeroot debian/rules clean build binary
To test the deb, I copy it to a fresh ubuntu server install and dpkg -i to install it. I get a bunch of errors because dpkg -i doesn’t resolve dependencies, but I run apt install -f and the dependencies are installed.
Once I tested and tweaked and got things working, I updated the tarball `tar -Jcf ../kioskme_0.0.0-0.orig.tar.xz -C .. –exclude=’debian’ kioskme` and I used dpkg-buildpackage -S to build a source package and then I used dput ppa:evarlast/kiosk ../kioskme_0.0.0-1_source.changes to upload to PPA.
Now, this still does not work in a VM. Ubuntu desktop installer must do some magic to make X work in a virtual machine with a driver which works with VMWare, VirtualBox, or Parallels.