Hello! Hope some of you can give me a piece of advise with this. I want to use EDGE Panel to connect to an AB Clx 5000 processor and I would like to know how can I make EDGE Panel to start really fast. Which OS should I use for? Is EDGE Panel capable to load its own graphical interface without the need of having the OS desktop? I tried with Ubuntu 20 minimal installation and set the Ignition Client up to start once the OS is up but I still see the desktop for a while and also the client must wait to gateway to start. Is any way to improve these points? Thanks to all of you!
The fastest dedicated startup is using a custom Xsession that just loads the full-screen Vision client instead of any desktop environment. With the “greeter” set to auto-login and re-login, you end up with a kiosk that simply cannot be broken, as any success killing off the client just makes the greeter run it again.
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Thank you! Is there any documentation about configuring the Xsession for EDGE Panel you can share? Thank you again!!
Not handy, but I know someone who’s done it for me for a Raspberry Pi. I’ll post it when I get a chance to dig it up. In the meantime, I recommend the documentation at freedesktop.org.
You should probably start from a server edition (without a graphical interface).
If you then install xorg, you can run the ignition client from your xinit script (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xinit#Starting_applications_without_a_window_manageras example).
Then, every time you login, you can execute startx to load the vision client… not good enough I guess, people on a kiosk aren’t going to type startx.
But you can run startx automatically by adding it to your .bash_profile (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xinit#Autostart_X_at_login). Next time you log in to your console. It will open the client.
But this still requires you to login to the shell. Finally, that can also be automated by using the getty systemd service (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Getty#Automatic_login_to_virtual_console)
Note that this is all on the Arch wiki. Arch is great for hacking, and has a great wiki, but I wouldn’t advice a rolling release for a kiosk. Better take something stable that you can test before shipping with all the same software. The documentation however, is useful on most Linux systems (with some exceptions, like if you don’t use systemd, you can’t log in with a systemd service off course).
Also, if you would switch to Perspective. There are Linux distributions specifically made to run as Kiosk with a web browser. Like Porteus (http://www.porteus.org/). But I haven’t found any that make it easy to run a Java app.
I do not recommend using startx. I recommend distros/desktops that use sddm, as its configuration file is well-documented and very simple.