[Peeweelinux] PeeweeLinux + Xwindows booting from Compact Flash

[Daniel Purcell]

Ashley,

I have been following the discussion about your project to build a kiosk 
with a web interface for a convention.  I have been working on a similar 
project using PeeWeeLinux, and I think I may be of a little help.

I'm working on a project for my company.  We call it the SolarKiosk.  We 
have some government grant money to build little solar-powered kiosk 
computers out in the desert in Utah.  The kiosks provide weather 
information and water information to mostly farmers who depend very much 
on weather and water information so that they know how much to irrigate 
their crops.  It's called the SolarKiosk because the kiosks will be 
powered by solar panels and batteries.  They each have a low-speed 
wireless internet link, as well.

The project isn't 100% completed yet, but we have a working prototype in 
our office.

I chose to use the PeeWeeLinux distribution as the base operating 
system.  We bought one of those Geode 300X "brick" SBCs because we 
wanted video and sound capabilities on our kiosks.  I installed a 2.4.18 
kernel (using the howto in this mailing-list archive -- big thanks to 
the author!), and instead of running X windows and then a web browser on 
top of that, I found a version of the  Konqueror web browser will run 
without X Windows - using the frame buffer device instead.  This saved a 
lot of hassle and ramdisk space.

The "embedded" Konqueror browser is HTML 4.01 compliant, does CCS, 
JavaScript, and does Gif/Jpeg/Png just like the regular X11 browser 
does.  It also comes with support for a Flash plugin (I couldn't get it 
to compile, though, but I'm sure its very possible .. perhaps I should 
read more in the Konqueror/Embedded newsgroups for directions on how to 
compile it.).  Best of all, the Konq/e browser stripped is just under 3 
megabytes.  Konq/e also has a configure option, where you can specify it 
to run in a Kiosk mode -- fullscreen, without the window resizing, 
menubar, toolbar, navigation bar, etc.  It's exactly what we needed for 
the SolarKiosk.  Konqeuror also is fully keyboard navigatable, so we 
could set up the Kiosk without a mouse and it will still be usable by 
the users.

For the Konqueror browser to work, all I had to do was to install the 
Qt/Embedded libraries.  These take up about 5 megabytes, plus font files 
(which can be from 1 meg to 10 megs, depending on what fonts you want to 
make available for the web browser).

We wanted the SolarKiosk to also be able to run perl programs, so we got 
Perl 5.0005 running.  We even got Perl/Tk running successfully. The 
SolarKiosk has sshd running on it, so you can scp files and ssh into the 
SolarKiosk from remote locations.  The SolarKiosk also has rsync, to 
syncronize files (or the "content") that will display the weather 
information to the kiosk users.

Because the SolarKiosks won't have a very fast internet link, we wanted 
to slowly "trickle" the content and cache it on the SolarKiosk. I 
installed Apache 1.3.27 + PHP 4.3.2 (just under 2 megabytes), so that 
the Konq/E browser points to its own localhost and displays the web 
pages from its own memory.

For the sound, I got the appropriate kernel modules for my soundcard on 
the SBC (soundblaster 2.0 + compatable in my case), and I use the mpg123 
program that comes with PeeWeeLinux.  We would then generate mp3 files 
on a separate machine, and "trickle" mp3 files to the SolarKiosk, so 
when a user clicks on certain pages, the audio bytes can be heard from 
the Kiosk as well as read on the screen.

I used the "autobootx" from ... (I hope I get my credits right) .. was 
it Barry that created that? Anyway, I set it up so that it autoboots the 
Konqeuror Browser in Kiosk mode, pointing to http://localhost/ .

We bought one of those keyboard encoders two weeks ago, too.  With a 
keyboard encoder, you can map a switch or a button to a keyboard key.  
Our SolarKiosk has only three buttons (no keyboard, no mouse), and is 
fully navigatable.  I mapped one pushbutton to tab (for Konq/e to go to 
the next link / page down), another pushbutton to shift+tab (for Konq/e 
to go to the previous link/page up), and the third button to enter 
("click" on the selected link).

The SolarKiosk itself is pretty much complete.  The website and the 
server-side content-generating programs are my current tasks.  The 
website isn't complete, but you're welcome to go see and download  a 
version of the SolarKiosk and try it out on your system.

The website URL is: http://www.picklebone.com/solarkiosk/

If anyone else is interested in this project, please let me know! 

-Daniel Purcell
StoneFly Technology
St. George, UT

Barry Gershenfeld wrote:

>>	-	A flash capable browser (mozilla?)
>>    
>>
>
>Mozilla is so huge I won't even put it on my desktop machine.
>But there is a browser-only version called Firebird.  
>Browser only?  Yes, no page composer, no email client, no newsreader, etc.
>And there are other browsers, like Opera.
>
>  
>
>>this was unrealistic, although keeping boot time down is still of
>>importance.
>>    
>>
>
>On my app (server, no X) about half the boot time is in the
>board's POST and BIOS.  Something to shop for.
>
>  
>
>>Personally I detest flash, however my vote doesn't get very far on this
>>    
>>
>
>Flash is a good technology.  Horribly misused 95% of the time.
>
>Barry
>  
>