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!