GNOME Kiosk configuration

Desktop
1

Hey,

Could someone tell me how to install/configure GNOME Kiosk on Fedora Linux and/or Rocky Linux? Rocky Linux have gnome-kiosk package which I got working in TTY (gnome-kiosk --wayland), but despite my efforts, I could not configure it with the help of the prohect Git, documentation of gnome sessions configuration and this Red Hat’s blog post. There is no proper documentation of the GNOME Kiosk anywhere. I’m trying to make an info display, so the system should open the webpage with Firefox on GNOME Kiosk.

2

Probably the easiest way to get started with GNOME Kiosk on fedora is to:

  1. Install gnome-kiosk-script-session, boot to the GDM login screen
  2. Choose your kiosk user
  3. Log into a normal GNOME session, and configure the kiosk user for automatic login from control center (or edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf directly)
  4. Log out (not reboot!)
  5. Choose your kiosk user from the login screen, select the “Kiosk Script” option from the cog
  6. Log into that Kiosk Script session and edit the script in the launched gedit window to run:

firefox --kiosk --private-window --new-instance http://thewebsitehere

instead of gedit.

  1. Save and reboot

You could also get more into the nitty gritty by looking at the provided “Search Appliance” example:

  1. Install gnome-kiosk-search-appliance
  2. Choose “Search Appliance Session” from the session cog
  3. Note this starts a kiosk session to google.com, which is similar to what you want, but the website is wrong.
  4. So run rpm -ql gnome-kiosk-search-appliance and mimic what you see…
  5. Note there are 4 files. Create similar files with different names.

/usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Kiosk.SearchApp.desktop contains the URL to go to, so you could e.g. make a /usr/share/applications/MyKioskApp.desktop that has a different website

Then copy /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/org.gnome.Kiosk.SearchApp.session to /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/MyKioskGNOMESession.session and make it reference MyKioskApp instead of org.gnome.Kiosk.SearchApp.

Then copy /usr/share/wayland-sessions/org.gnome.Kiosk.SearchApp.Session.desktop to /usr/share/wayland-sessions/MyKioskGDMSession.desktop and make it reference MyKioskGNOMESession instead of org.gnome.Kiosk.SearchApp

(and likewise for /usr/share/xsessions/org.gnome.Kiosk.SearchApp.Session.desktop )

At that point you should have your own session the login screen session cog menu and you can configure automatic login, log out and select it.

I think the browser use case is common enough it would be good if GNOME Kiosk provided a “Kiosk Browser Session” choice that just had the user put the website in /etc/gnome-kiosk/browser.config or something. If you wanted to file that feature request in gitlab, that’d be great.

1 Like
3

Thanks for quick reply! I assumed this would be easier for Fedora Linux, as I found https://packages.fedoraproject.org/ has some useful packages for it. However, as far as I know, there is only the gnome-kiosk package for Rocky Linux. Could you give similar instructions to Rocky? As a suggestion for improvement, it would be great if documentation were improve to GNOME Kiosk’s Git, man page, etc.

4

I’ve never used Rocky Linux, but I just did a search and it seems to have the same packages in its “devel” repo:

http://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/9/devel/x86_64/os/Packages/g/gnome-kiosk-script-session-40.0-4.el9_0.1.noarch.rpm
http://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/9/devel/x86_64/os/Packages/g/gnome-kiosk-search-appliance-40.0-4.el9_0.1.noarch.rpm

1 Like
5

Done :smiley:

6

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