I recently wrote about a new home information display I set up. The information itself is just HTML+CSS with a little bit of Python for the dynamic content. So the bulk of the information display involves running a full-screen browser at system boot time. I ended up selecting Google Chrome after some experimentation with Firefox and various full-screen plugins.

It took a bit of searching, but I found that Chrome has as "--kiosk" mode. That mostly did what I needed it to, after I set up the system to automatically log-in at boot, and configured Chrome to go to my sign page at startup.

The other issue I ran into is that if the system shuts down (say, because of a reboot or a power failure), it will come up with a "Do you want to restore your last session" banner. I worked around this by having the X session call a script instead of the browser directly. I created a tar file of the ".config" directory with the browser shut down. Then I set the script to remove the existing ".config" directory, untar the pristine one, and then start "google-chrome --kiosk". This has been running a few weeks and has been very reliable.

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