Surfing on an Interactive Kiosk

The Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded are often used for building custom GNU/Linux distributions for powering interactive kiosk and displaying HTML5 content.

Although Chromium is the most popular choice for a web browser, it is infamous for the long build time. In this presentation you will see a practical alternative approach using the surf web browser. Surf is a simple minimalist web browser based on WebKit2/GTK+ with interface that does not include any graphical control elements. It a perfect fit for a kiosk.

The presentation offers the exact steps how to build a minimal GNU/Linux distribution with systemd, X11, openbox window manager and the Surf web browser. Furthermore, we will discuss practical examples for software over air updates of this simple distribution. Raspberry Pi 4 will be used as a reference hardware for all demonstrations.