How to set up digital signage on Ubuntu Frame

Contents:

• Introduction
• Outline
• Setting up
  • The server
  • The renderer
  • The dashboards
• Summary

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Introduction

This document walks through an example of deploying a digital signage solution on Ubuntu Core, with Ubuntu Frame as the display server. It uses Dashkiosk, a simple dashboard manager to control the displays, and WPE WebKit distributed as a snap to render them.

Outline

For consistency, we’ll call the hardware that you connect the displays to - the receivers. The software that renders the content - the renderers. The Dashkiosk instance - the server. And the content displayed - the dashboards.

Dashkiosk is a simple web server at which you need to point the renderers. You can manage as many displays as you need, for example by running it on some central server hardware - but you then need to ensure connectivity between the renderers and the server (like using a reverse proxy to listen outside of localhost), which is out of scope for this guide.

A dashboard can be anything that a web browser can render - a web page, an image, or a video. The receivers need network access to whatever’s hosting the dashboards, as the server only tells the renderers what URL to display, but doesn’t participate in the rendering. Creating the dashboards is also out of scope for this guide - refer to Dashkiosk documentation for more detail.

Setting up

The server

We’ve packaged Dashkiosk as a snap, so the installation is as easy as:

sudo snap install dashkiosk

You can then reach the administration panel on port 9400, under /admin, for example http://127.0.0.1:9400/admin, if you installed it locally. You will see that there are no displays yet.

If you point your browser at http://127.0.0.1:9400/receiver, you will see some default images being rendered, and a display will show up in the administration panel. The receiver will get a random serial generated and you can give it a name and set some other properties. You can find out more in Dashkiosk display configuration.

You can configure the server by editing /var/snap/dashkiosk/current/config.json. You can change the port, add basic authentication and see Dashkiosk configuration for a reference. After you change anything, restart the server to apply the changes:

sudo snap restart dashkiosk

The renderer

To have a web browser running fullscreen on a display, we’ll use the WPE kiosk snap hosted on Ubuntu Frame. To install those:

sudo snap install ubuntu-frame wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk

1. On Ubuntu Core you should soon see the WPE website displayed
   Now, let’s hide the cursor and point the renderer at Dashkiosk:

   sudo snap set ubuntu-frame="cursor=null"
   sudo snap set wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk url=http://localhost:9400/receiver
   

   That’s it! Every time your device boots it will display the dashboards configured in Dashkiosk.

   You can read Where does Ubuntu Frame work? to find the right hardware for you.

2. On classic Ubuntu, you will need a bit more set up
   Allow the WPE snap to connect to Frame:

   sudo snap connect wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk:wayland ubuntu-frame
   

   If testing on your desktop, you’ll need X11 support and run:

   WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-99 ubuntu-frame --cursor null & \
     sleep 1; wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk.cog http://localhost:9400/receiver &
   
   # To stop it
   kill %1 %2
   

   

   Or, if you’re running things on dedicated hardware, you can make it permanent, just like on Core above:

   sudo snap set ubuntu-frame daemon=true
   sudo snap set wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk daemon=true
   sudo snap set wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk url=http://localhost:9400/receiver
   

The dashboards

For completion, as mentioned above, setting up the dashboards is out of scope for this guide. You should refer to the Dashkiosk documentation - but just as an example, I’ll replace /unassigned in the “Unassigned” group’s single dashboard with a random dashboard example.

Summary

In this example we’ve deployed a very simple setup for digital signage solutions based on Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu Frame. It may well fulfill your use case - but if it doesn’t, Ubuntu Frame can help bridge any application to your display.

We’re working on supporting multiple displays driven from the same hardware, so you can reduce cost and complexity. We’ll update this document when this is possible.