Hello everyone,
Just finished Distro Hopping and I am very happy with Fedora in many ways. So it looks like my hopping days have come to an end and will be sticking with Fedora.
I am in the middle of putting pen onto paper regarding Telematics technology, and I wouldn’t mind extending Fedora onto the in-vehicle tablets for Navigation, Driver Login and Fatigue management purposes.
Can you advise wether Fedora CoreOS is suitable for Tablets, and if so, can it be installed on ARM based devices which currently have Linux 3.10 and 5.10 installed.
Lastly if the above questions provide positive answers, is there an easier way to create the solution, without the need for using Qt or Buildroot?
Fedora CoreOS doesn’t really come with any UI components by default. If you were planning to run the UI/DE components from a container then it could work (I haven’t tried to do that).
Fedora CoreOS comes with the latest kernel in stable Fedora which is currently kernel-6.3.6-200.fc38.
I think this depends on my question above about whether you’re running things from a container or not.
It sounds like you’re looking for something like a kiosk: an application that runs on top of a base OS without exposing the OS itself, usually with limited input options like a touchscreen. If that’s the case, I would look into Fedora IoT, which has always treated ARM as a first-class target platform. You could probably even build the whole thing on a Raspberry Pi or other single-board ARM system and design the application to run as a container.
Between the ARM support, kiosk-like application and GUI needs, I think Fedora IoT is the most suitable choice. You can find all kinds of guides on getting started with IoT kiosks, some are even kid-friendly. It’s that easy to deploy once you’ve built the app.
The idea is to build your application as a web app with a typical web stack. Then you run a browser in kiosk mode from the command line. A browser like this is just a stripped down version of Chromiuim that can only access that one site running on the localhost. It has no way to access anything other than your single-page web app. The whole system can have network access, but the browser is restricted to its homepage. Then it’s just a matter of doing fullstack web development on localhost, set up to run as a container. The web approach is an easy alternative to Qt and I expect that using a stripped down browser to access a localhost site is more performant than a full Electron app.
This looks like the way I did it when I was playing around (sadly I wasn’t using Fedora then). There are an infinite number of ways to set this up and the web app was just familiar to me. I also found a Fedora article about making a kiosk with Silverblue and Gnome Kiosk. All of the software should be free and up for grabs.