Touch Screen Chromium Kiosk on the Raspberry Pi

I have recently received a new 10″ touchscreen from Chalkboard Electronics and have been looking into getting a web site to run full screen on my Raspberry Pi. Based on the instructions posted here by lokir, I have got Chromium up and running under Raspbian and have added some instructions for improving touch screen support in the browser.

First, make sure you’ve got an up to date package list by running:

sudo apt-get update

Secondly, lets get everything we need installed:

sudo apt-get install chromium x11-xserver-utils unclutter

Next, in order to prevent the screen from going blank or the screen saver kicking in we need to make some alterations to /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart. First we need to comment out the screensaver line (place a # at the beginning of the line). Then we need to add the following lines:

@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@chromium -kiosk -incognito http://www.example.com/

Make sure you replace the url in the above example.

Now, open up Chromium on the desktop and head over to the chrome web store and install the chromeTouch extension. This extension makes scrolling act similarly to mobile browser where by swiping your finger scrolls the window. Make sure you allow this extension to run in incognito mode by going to Chromium’s extension settings page.

That’s it! Now, when you log in to the pi it will automatically launch an incognito window to the url specified in the autostart file. Easy!

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