The Porteus Kiosk team has anounced release of Porteus Kiosk 4.5.0, latest stable update of Gentoo based, specialized GNU/Linux distribution for embedded systems like display boards, ATM installation ..etc. Considering the continues requirement for security updates, this release ships various updated packages like Linux Kernel 4.12.10, Firefox 52.3.0 ESR and Google Chrome 60.0.3112.113. It also includes other package updates tagged with revision 20170901.
Important highlights in Porteus Kiosk 4.5.0 release can be summarized as:
For more information, read release announcement, detailed change log and change documents.
- Added support for EAP over LAN (802.1x) authentication on wired connections.
- VNC and SSH daemons can be limited to listening on localhost interface. This is useful from security point of view as nobody can access the kiosk on public network interface. Mind that you'll have to use another service: Porteus Kiosk Server, Guacamole, NoVNC, etc in order to tunnel VNC or SSH traffic to kiosk's localhost interface.
- Its possible to calibrate multiple touchscreen devices which are connected to kiosk.
- Cloud and ThinClient systems no longer expose shutdown options by default. Its required to explicitly enable shuttdown menu in kiosk configuration in order to allow restarting or powering off the PC by the users.
- WPA supplicant will run on all available wireless network interfaces and not only the first one. This is handy if primary wifi card does not work properly (hardware failure, unstable connection, mising driver/firmware) and you want to use wifi dongle as replacement.
- Tunneling service to Porteus Kiosk Server is started as a daemon rather than a script. When demonized the tunelling process can survive Xorg session restart and system runlevel change.
- Added support for email notifications to Porteus Kiosk Server. For now the only supported notification is when client goes offline for specific time period.
- Its possibe to sort client list by categories (system/kernel version, browser, last connected time, etc) in the view settings of the Administration Panel.
- Other bugfixes and improvements.