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Hi I'm having a idea of develop a light weight Linux kernel which will boot and open a web browser in full screen and request data from pre define URL. Can any one give me some guides on this please.

goldilocks
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user63023
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1 Answers1

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Hi I'm having a idea of develop a light weight Linux kernel

It's not particularly heavy to start with -- a stock kernel with a minimal filesystem requires < 25 MB of RAM. So don't worry about that part.

which will boot and open a web browser in full screen and request data from pre define URL

You want to create a kiosk, in other words. There are various ways to do this, probably the easiest being the use of a distribution dedicated to such purpose, such as the Fedora Kiosk spin.

It should be explained that the kernel cannot execute a file browser itself. After the kernel boots, it loads a program called init and that then initializes the userland of the operating system. Since a file browser is a userland application, you can use the init system to accomplish this. Exactly how that is done depends on which init system you are using, which depends upon which distribution you are using.

goldilocks
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  • Hi, thanks for the quick response , if I use kiosk isn't the GUI is also enable? Can't i display web request detail with out booting GUI? – user63023 Mar 19 '14 at 14:09
  • No. You can render graphics to the framebuffer without X, but I promise you will not find a web browser that does this. If by "web request detail" you mean, e.g., the html source of a page or other textual data, sure, you can display unformatted text on a console. There are also (non-graphical) console browsers such as `lynx`. – goldilocks Mar 19 '14 at 15:03
  • Can we inStall Linux on a ROM of a device? – user63023 Mar 20 '14 at 12:25