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thinRoot is a buildroot (https://buildroot.org/) powered operating system environment to create lightweight user-defined kiosk systems as ThinClients (e.g. using intel NUC, RaspberryPi, ASUS Tinkerboard, etc.) to smoothly connect to server-based desktop environments using ThinLinc, RDP (xfreerdp/remmina), VNC, etc. or to create simply web-kiosk systems displaying a webpage fullscreen.

🍪 Features

  • provides a lightweight kiosk system which after bootup provides a simple connection GUI with options to connect via ThinLinc, RDP (via freerdp or remmina) or VNC to Linux and Windows-based Terminalservers.
  • allows to run a fullscreen webbrowser (e.g. qt-webengine-kiosk) for webkiosk-based applications.
  • allows to either use PXE/TFTP-based network boot environments or allow to directly install the thinRoot images onto a local storage disk.
  • allows to create full-fledged system images below 150MB in size (e.g. for a fast network-based bootup).

🔥 Limitations

  • The only limitation is, that we are currently not providing ready-to-use images for your selected hardware. Hence, you will have to create these images yourself using the provided information below.

💻 Requirements

  1. One of the following ThinClient / single-board-computer (SBC) hardware:
    • RaspberryPi 4, RaspberryPi 400, RaspberryPi Compute Module 4
    • RaspberryPi 3, RaspberryPi Compute Module 3
    • ASUS Tinkerboard, ASUS Tinkerboard S
    • All "Intel NUC" type systems
  2. If you want to run thinRoot as a pure network booted system, you require a PXE+TFTP+DHCP environment.
  3. A server-based desktop environment to connect to (e.g. Linux via ThinLinc, Windows via RDP, etc.).

☁️ Installation

The installation of thinRoot is quite straight forward as it is delivered as a full PXE bootable system image that can be directly booted using a PXE+TFTP+DHCP environment:

  1. Download latest release archive for the hardware platform you are using:
  2. Unarchive tar.bz2 file resulting in a 'bzImage' file to be bootable via a standard PXE environment.

😋 How to contribute

As the thinRoot project is an open source based project everyone is invited to contribute to this project. So, if you are a talented developer and want to contribute to the success of thinRoot feel free to send over pull requests or report issues / enhancement requests. Please note, however, the licensing and contributing implications and accept that - in short - anything you contribute to this repository/project (especially source code) will be (re)licensed under the Apache 2.0 license (see CONTRIBUTING.md). In addition, please understand that we will only accept contributions (either source code or issues in the issue tracker) if these comply to our CODE OF CONDUCT.

💰 Donations Donate

Even for those that don't have the technical knowhow to help developing on thinRoot there are ways to support our development. Please consider sending us a donation to not only help us to compensate for expenses regarding thinRoot, but also to keep our general development motivation on a high level. So if you want to donate some money please feel free to send us money via PayPal. And if you are running a business which might integrate thinRoot in one of your products please contact us for a regular donation plan which could not only show that you do care about open source development, but also could secure your product by ensuring that development on thinRoot continues in future.

🚧 Development

Building your own thinRoot image is a very straight forward process using this build environment – given that you have sufficient Linux/Unix knowledge and you know what you are actually doing. But if you know what you are doing and which host tools are required to actually be able to run a thinRoot build, it should be as simple as:

$ git clone https://github.com/jens-maus/thinRoot
$ cd thinRoot
$ make PRODUCT=generic-x86_64 release
[wait up to 1h]
$ cp release/thinroot-YYYYMMDD-generic-x86_64.img /tftpboot/thinroot/

📜 License

The thinRoot build environment itself – the files found in this git repository – as well as the thinRoot images are licensed under the conditions of the Apache License 2.0. Please note, however, that the buildroot distribution thinRoot is using is licensed under the GPLv2 license instead.

👪 Authors

See Contributors for a complete list of people that have directly contributed to this project.