Web browser/ xvkbd.tcz on PicorePlayer image

[tomster]

Hi there!

I am trying to bring a kiosk-style desktop/ web browser to spb's PiCorePlayer image. This is because I am planning on mounting a touch display in one of our kitchen drawers and control my home-automation system (FHEM) from there. The same machine should serve as the kitchen unit for my Squeezebox-system.

So far I did manage to get TC and Midori installed. Midori will start-up at boot time and is loading the intended start-page. Sadly Midori cannot display the webpage correctly (decent amount of Javascript & CSS). It gets crappily rendered and none of the hyperlinks would work. BTW, same thing on a test-installation of Midori I put on a Windows environment. Conclusion: Midori won't work for me.

In some of Bela's (older) postings here on the forums I read that there is no chromium/ webkit browser support in PC. Is that true? Any recommendations on available browser packages?

The second thing I was looking for (and could not find) is a virtual keyboard for the touch screen. There used to be a xvkbd.tcz in older TC-releases but I can't find it in PiCore's repository. Has the package been dropped or simply not been added yet?

Thx in advance. Keep up the good work!
Tom

[curaga]

Midori is a webkit browser though.

[bmarkus]

Midori is a webkit browser though.

True

[tomster]

Ok, touché ;-)

Then let me put my question in that way: is there an alternative?

[bmarkus]

Ok, touché ;-)

Then let me put my question in that way: is there an alternative?

If you need JS and HTML5, no. It works fine with large, complex news sites and portals, YouTube, etc. I find it a usable alternative against Firefox, Chrome, etc.

I would say if you have an issue related to a site blame the site instead of Midori (or Webkit rendering engine).

[tomster]

Don't get me wrong. I am not blaming anything.
As in most cases there is a desired user scenario and then there's the way to get there.

I do really fancy PiCore/ Tiny Core, especially since it's RAM-run (nice word). The PiCorePlayer is IMHO a pretty good example for a useful scenario. In terms of the future user-circle (my wife) everything has to be as DAU-safe as it can possibly get. You could not imagine on what machines she managed to pull the plug just to get a vacuumer running or her mobile charged...

The limited specs of the RasPi are a challenge. That's for sure. But should that keep me from trying?
I just started to get into PiCore for a couple of days now. Therefore please excuse if I am missing something on the one or the other end.

There is no out-of-the-box browser-tcz being capable of my scenario at the moment. OK. No good, but hey...

That much said I'd also like to hear some words on the 2nd question I asked:

What about the xvkbd.tcz? Has it been dropped from the rep for any reason? Also here: Is there an alternative?

[curaga]

If you're willing to compile, you can get xvkbd as well as many browsers (not chromium though, it requires much more RAM to build than the pi2 has), and hopefully send them to the repo to help the next user

[gavinmc42]

Hi Tom,

Had the same thought, a UI based on web stuff, JS,HTML,CSS.
IoT via WiFi or Ethernet is easy, I use above with busybox-httpd.

Once you add screen to the device it gets messy.
Embedded Webkit with GPU accelerated graphic would be nice and can use the above method.
This is new tech, not quite ready:(

See the tcl/tk post for one old way to do UI's.
Cut down version of tcl called Jim look interesting, got some new stuff added.
Jim looks really good, in fact I wish I knew how to compile it. hint hint Bela.
tcl.tcz is 1.1MB, Jim 100-200k?

Just been googling UX/UI, turns out iPhone/Android are the top Ui's.
UX/UI on IoT = big can of worms.
Even Microsoft involved now.
tcl/tk requires x11.

For me I don't want to compile, so it needs to be a scripting language based UI.
What we need is a simple script to graphics layer.
No big deal right:)

Regards
Gavin

[tomster]

Bummer! After having trying a couple of different browsers on a "fully grown" Debian Jessie on my Raspi2 I found out that the only browser working with "my" webpage is Chromium...
Just wanted to let you know.

[nitram]

QtWeb browser is available in TC6 x86 repo, 13mb total, requires no additional dependencies, runs in Xorg and Xvesa, snappy, appears to render pages well. No idea if it would work in Raspberry but might be worth a try.

[tomster]

I gave QTWeb a quick check here at the office (on a Win machine). Rendering seems fine, at least waaay better than Midori did.
But on "my" webpage the hyperlinks still don't seem to work. I guess I have to do a little more inspection why Chromium can cope with the page and other browsers can't.
Maybe jQuery...

[sbp]

Hi, could you provide a link to the problematic webpage?

[curaga]

It really sounds like a buggy webpage if it fails in webkit and firefox (I assume you tried FF on Debian).

[tomster]

The webpage is only locally running on a FHEM home automation server. It's a GUI front end called "Tablet UI". So I can't provide a link to a working demo. It's basicly HTML with some jQuery/ Javascript widgets:
https://github.com/knowthelist/fhem-tablet-ui

I haven't tried FF yet. I went for lightweight browsers like Midori, QTWeb, Netsurf, etc. in the beginning. I wanted to find a browser for TC/ picore integration. None of them worked. Neither on my RasPi nor on a windows machine where equivalents were available. After those set-backs I went straight for Chromium, of course on Debian now, and it worked out of the box. For the time being I will stick with this set-up for further testing.