Perspective Workstation Working on Ubuntu MATE 24.04.1 LTS

Ignition
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1

Hi all,

I work at a coffee roasting plant with lots of dust and I was interested in a cheaper alternative to ThinManager and ThinOS running HMIs on a barebones, encased industrial PC. To me, Ignition Perspective on a Linux-Based OS offers similar functionality, so I began testing out how to run Perspective Workstation on Linux.

I think I saw that devs only really tested with Ubuntu and that the default Gnome DE (desktop environment) had trouble with the full screen KIOSK mode (I also experienced this). I then saw Kubuntu mentioned as the recommended Linux OS, but I wanted something more lightweight on the storage and RAM since my hardware isn't too powerful inside the fanless industrial PCs.

I ended up installing default Ubuntu and I basically installed DEs on top, one after another, to search for a working KIOSK mode. Other than KDE Plasma, I only had success with Budgie and MATE. I ended up picking Ubuntu MATE 24.04.1 LTS (long term support) among the 3 DEs because it's green like coffee and means something like "Sharing Caffeine". That and because it's user-friendly, stable, lightweight, and gtk-based (so it can run .desktop files using the gtk-launch command).

Anyway, I performed a minimal install on a test laptop. Then when it launched the first time, I opened Firefox and went to our Ignition gateway homepage to download Perspective Workstation. To get it working, I had to perform a few actions in Terminal.

First navigate to the Downloads folder:

cd Downloads

Then tar extract the zip file there to the applications folder, while removing the top level "perspectiveworkstation" folder. "-xzvf" extracts the zipped target file to another file/folder. "-C" moves that extracted folder to another directory. "--strip-components=1" removes the top level folder.

sudo tar -xzvf perspectiveworkstation.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C /usr/share/applications

There will be 2 folders (app and runtime) and a .desktop file placed into the /usr/share/applications directory. The .desktop file must be in this directory in order to be launched as an application (alternatively it can be in /usr/local/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications).

However, in Ubuntu MATE, the permissions will be locked when the files are placed here, so we have to unlock the 2 folders with chmod. "-R" means recursive, so all subfolders within the target folders will also be re-permissioned. "777" means everything will become readable, writeable, and executable by the file owner, the user group, and all other users.

sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/share/applications/app /usr/share/applications/runtime

Finally, you can launch Perspective Workstation using either of the following lines. You can also add this line to Ubuntu MATE's "Startup Applications" in order to auto-launch when the computer is turned on.

gtk-launch perspectiveworkstation
gtk-launch perspectiveworkstation.desktop

I don't believe the Windows CLI scripts for Perspective Workstation described in the documentation will work in the Linux startup applications, so I can't open multiple projects on startup. However, I configured a default application to run on my Perspective Workstation so that when the HMI PC boots up the first time, it launches Perspective Workstation and then it auto-launches the default application in KIOSK mode. It is difficult to exit the full screen project to switch to another application, which is actually what I wanted for the HMI. Other than that, I did have a slight issue launching KIOSK mode in full screen without the project being the default Workstation project, but not all the time.

Hope this helps any other Ignition on Linux fans out there!

2

Just sharing this experience for posterity. I ended up having to switch to Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, because Ubuntu MATE did not have a working On-Screen Keyboard (OSK) for use with touch-screens running Ignition Perspective (Linux). The install steps for Ignition were exactly the same as above, since Pop!_OS is also based on Ubuntu. It's also similarly lightweight.

When manually searching for the gateway on the Perspective Launcher, the OSK was not working, so I had to use a keyboard for the initial connection to my project. However, once I entered the perspective session for the project, the OSK was working again (for login, textboxes, etc.).

I also wanted to enable auto-login to the OS, in the event of a power outage at the plant. There is a toggle in System > Users for auto-login. However, when this is enabled, the perspective session launch will trigger a popup that says "The login keyring did not get unlocked when you logged into your computer". This popup will prevent interacting with the Perspective Session in KIOSK mode until the popup is cleared. So I ended up going to "Passwords and Keys", right-clicking the login to change the keyring password, and set the keyring password to blank (didn't type anything, just pressed enter). I figured this is OK since there is no sensitive information stored on the OS, and Ignition already has its own login security.

3

Yep, this is what I had to do as well. I like Kubuntu when using Ignition for Vision projects, but had to go to PopOS for proper OSK support when using Perspective.

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