A kiosk computer running OpenBSD

Author: Solène

Date: 11 October 2022

Tags: openbsd

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Introduction

Let's have fun doing OpenBSD kiosks! As explained in a recent article, a kiosk is a computer dedicated to display things or to be used interactively without being able to escape the current program.

I modified the script `surf-display` which run the web browser `surf` in full screen and run various commands to sanitize the environment to prevent users to escape surf to make it compatible with OpenBSD.

surf-display-openbsd project page

surf-display project page

Installation

It's rather simple

1. `git clone https://tildegit.org/solene/surf-display-openbsd`

2. `install -m 555 surf-display-openbsd/bin/surf-display /usr/local/bin/`

3. edit `~/.xsession` to use `/usr/local/bin/surf-display` as a window manager

You will also need dependencies:

Now, when you log in your user, `surf` will be started automatically, and you can't escape it, so you will need to switch to a TTY if you want to disable it, or through ssh.

Configuration

The configuration is relatively simple for a single screen setup. Edit the file `/etc/surf-display` and put the URL you want to display as the value of `DEFAULT_WWW_URI=`, this file will be loaded by `surf-display` when it runs, otherwise OpenBSD website will be displayed.

Conclusion

It's still a bit rough for OpenBSD, I'd like to add xprintidle to automatically restart the session if the user has been inactive, but it's working really well already!