# Raspberry Powered Wallboard

Having information displayed on a wall or monitor in an office or other public space can be very useful to the people in that area. This post talks about how you can use a raspberry pi and any old monitor or tv to display an arbitrary webpage or application on it.

# Setup

We are going to start with is a up-to-date ArchLinux image, read this if you don't know how to install ArchLinux to an sd card. Boot the image from the Raspberry Pi and login as root (the password is root as well). As with any install the very first thing you should do is update the system:

pacman -Syu

# The User

In keeping with best security practices its best to run things that don't need to run as root as a normal user. Create a new user called "wb" with:

useradd -m wb
passwd wb
> Enter new UNIX password: <type password here>
> Retype new UNIX password: <retype password here>
> passwd: password updated successfully

Now logout of root and login as the new user. When you need to run a command as root now you can login as root from another tty or you can run a single command as root with:

su root command

Note that any command in this post that start with a # should be run as root, and any command that start with a $ should be run as the normal user.

# XOrg

We are going to need xorg in order to run graphical programs so now is a good time to install it along with a window manager of your choice:

pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-xset xterm ratpoison

I choose to use ratpoison as the window manager as it has no boarders and displays all windows fully maximized by default. Its controls are a little weird in that you interact with it similar to screen (press ctrl+t,? to display the help page if you want to know the key bindings) but since we only want to launch one program this should not matter.

To tell xinit what to do when a user tried to start a xorg session you need to edit ~/.xinitrc of that user, so edit /home/wb/.xinitrc with the following contents:

setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0
xset -dpms
xset s off
exec ratpoison &
exec xterm

This will cause ratpoison to open in the background followed by xterm when the user starts an xorg-session. Normally you would start the programs you want first in the background then the window manager so that when you close the window manager the xorg-session ends. But in this situation we don't care about the window manager and would like to stop the session when our application stop (or crashes) as this will allow us to restart it automatically.

It also turns off the automatic screen power saving and blanking features which we don't want on a wallboard.

To test if this works run:

startx

and you should get a xterm window appear and xorg should stop if you close it (crtl+D or ctrl+T,K).

# The Web Browser

The common browsers, Firefox and chromium are sadly not available in the ArchLinuxArm repositories so an alternative must be used. In the end I decided to use the uzbl browser, a lightweight browser that sticks to the unix philosophy of one application one task. Uzbl is mostly keyboard driven and doesn't have lots of menus so makes it ideal for a wall board.

To install it run:

pacman -S uzbl-browser

There is also a uzbl-tabbled alternative if you require tab support, but this shouldn't be needed for a wallboard.

Once installed you can replace the

exec xterm

line in /home/wb/.xinitrc with

exec uzbl-browser http://www.example.com

to open uzbl to the given site when x starts.

You should now see a web browser start pointing to www.example.com when the wb user runs startx. Remember to change the url to where you want it to point.

If you are interested the key bindings for uzbl can be found here.

Note that you could replace the browser with any other browser you like, or even with an entirely different application.

# Running It All At Startup

The final step is to get everything to startup when the computer boots. ArchLinux now uses systemd by default so we need to create a new service file to auto login to the wb user. Create a copy the getty@.service and place it in /etc/systemd/system:

cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/getty@.service /etc/systemd/system/autologin@.service

now edit the following parts to make it auto login to the wb user:

[Service]
Type=simple
[...]
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear -a wb %I 38400
[...]
[Install]
Alias=getty.target.wants/getty@_tty1_.service

Change tty1 if you want to login to another tty. See this for more info about editing the service file to your needs. Now set this service to run at boot by running:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl disable getty@tty1.service
systemctl enable autologin@tty1.service

you can start it now to test it by running:

systemctl stop getty@tty1.service
systemctl start autologin@tty1.service

Note that you will be logged out of tty1 if you run this so best to do this from another tty.

Lastly we need to start x when the wb user logs in. This can be done by editing their .bash_profile file and add the following to the end:

startx
logout

The logout is there so that they automatically get logged out when the xorg session stops and allows systemd to restart the getty, which will automatically log them back in. This is very useful should the program crash at all as it will be started again soon after but has the downside of making it harder to login as the wb user manually.

# Conclusion

You can now reboot the raspberry pi

reboot

and it should come back displaying the webpage or application you picked. The only downside to this is that it will not auto refresh the page, which is ok if you have an ajax updated page, or one that auto refreshes its self, but not for static pages that could update behind the scenes. If anyone is interested I could look into how to make uzbl auto refresh, but for now this is good enough.