Raspberry PI boot to browser

Here at NiteoWeb, we use various SaaS monitoring and logging providers such as Librato Metrics and Papertrail to keep on top of our Plone and Pyramid projects. Hence the need to have a wall-mounted screen to display various graphs and outputs these services. What better way to drive the screen than a Raspberry Pi!

Getting the Raspberry Pi to boot into X and connect to the net was fairly trivial, just follow the official docs. However, getting the Pi to boot directly into a browser (also called “kiosk” mode) required some research. This is how I’ve done it in the end:

Disable screen sleep — so the screen stays on
```
$ sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

# add the following lines to the [SeatDefaults] section
```
# don’t sleep the screen

xserver-command=X -s 0 dpms
Hide cursor on inactivity
```
$ sudo apt-get install unclutter
```

Configure LXDE to start the Midori browser on login

$ sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart 

# comment everything and add the following lines

@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@midori -e Fullscreen -a http://plone.org

That’s it! Reboot and you are done!