Arch Linux Kiosk

Here at Southwestern Adventist University the administration decided to have TV’s as announcement boards. For this I’ve built an app that works with docker compose and serves the announcements, news & events on localhost. Sorry but I can’t share this app at the moment. I had this working on NUCs mounted on the TV’s with Ubuntu, but keeping up with it is just so cumbersome, so started looking for an alternative and found Arch Linux. There so many resources I’m using that I’ve decided to put them all in one place. I’ll make sure to reference them at the bottom.

timedatectl set-ntp true
fdisk /dev/sda

Use p to check that the label is not msdos, if it is, change it to gpt. Delete all partitions with d. Create a 512M EFI partition and a linux root x64 partition with n and t (to change the partition type).

Format the partitions:

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

Mount the partitions:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

Install Arch Linux and extras into root partition:

pacstrap /mnt base linux-lts linux-firmware vim\
    bash-completion networkmanager net-tools openssh\
    reflector wpa_supplicant wireless_tools netctl\
    sudo docker docker-compose git intel-ucode

Configure where the partitions will be mounted:

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab && cat /mnt/etc/fstab

Change into the freshly installed Arch Linux root:

arch-chroot /mnt

Set the timezone:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime

Uncomment line 177 to enable en_US.UTF-8 locale and generate

vim /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf

Just change arch for whatever your computer is going to be named:

echo arch > /etc/hostname

Change /etc/hosts to:

# Static table lookup for hostnames.
# See hosts(5) for details.

127.0.0.1   localhost
::1         localhost
127.0.1.1   arch

Change the root password

passwd

Install the EFI Boot Manager

bootctl --path=/boot install

Edit the /boot/loader/loader.conf file to look like this:

#timeout 3
#console-mode keep
default arch-*

Create the /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf file and make it look like this (you can get the root UUID from /etc/fstab):

title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux-lts
initrd /initramfs-linux-lts.img
options root=UUID=f691168b-f435-453c-b024-bc34baf0fc5f rw

Remove the Arch Linux USB, exit the chroot command and reboot

exit
reboot

Login with root and the password you set a few steps ago and start and enable the network:

systemctl start NetworkManager
systemctl enable NetworkManager

Start and enable OpenSSH

systemctl start sshd
systemctl enable sshd

Start and enable Docker

systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker

Add a user and set the user’s password:

useradd -m -g users -G wheel,docker,audio,video,storage username
passwd username

Create swap:

fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab
echo 'vm.swappiness=10' > /etc/sysctl.d/99-swappiness.conf

Configure wifi:

# nmcli con add type wifi ifname wlp3s0 con-name work-wifi ssid work-ssid
# nmcli con edit id work-wifi
nmcli> set ipv4.method auto
nmcli> set 802-1x.eap peap
nmcli> set 802-1x.phase2-auth mschapv2
nmcli> set 802-1x.identity myusername
nmcli> set 802-1x.password mypassword
nmcli> set wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-eap
nmcli> save
nmcli> activate
nmcli> save
nmcli> quit

Reboot

reboot

Login as root and configure mirrors:

reflector -c "US" -f 12 -l 10 -n 12 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
pacman -Su

Automatic login

systemctl edit getty@tty1

Modify file to look like this:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/usr/bin/agetty -nia username --noclear %I $TERM

Remove the tty info for auto-login

su - username
touch .hushlogin

Reboot

exit
reboot

Install packages to setup kiosk

pacman -S --needed mesa libva-vdpau-driver libva-mesa-driver\
    xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-xset xf86-video-fbdev\
    alsa-utils\
    gjs gnome-themes-standard\
    webkit2gtk gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good\
    gst-libav

Download GJS Browser

su - username
curl -L archibold.io/test/gjs/browser -o .browse
chmod a+x .browse

Edit .xinitrc to look like this

# avoid sleep
xset s off -dpms
# browse to local docker service
./.browse --fullscreen http://localhost

Add this at the end of the user’s .bashrc file

# startx on login
[[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec startx > /dev/null 2>&1

Done!

exit
reboot

Thanks to all these people for helping me out: