Above all, Merry Christmas, everyone!
So the FreeBSD 15.0R upgrades have been done for over a week, I upgraded my ZFS boxes, my UFS RPi, and all of my jails to 15.0 and to 15.0p1.
I purchased another used Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q Tiny to use as a TV PC. This one is an i5-7400T with 8GB of RAM. This should be plenty for what I need it for, though if it needs more RAM, I should have either a couple of 8GB or 4 4GB sticks from the ThinkCentres that I am using as servers, since I bumped them up to 32GB. Unfortunately, the unit I purchased did not state in an obvious place, that it shipped without a power brick. So I am waiting for the mailman to come today, with said power brick.
This will be a pc that, when logged in, run a web browser with a handful of tabs, one for jellyfin jail, one for netflix, while I keep it around (let's face it, netflix's programming has gone downhill, while their prices have gone up. I don't know how long we will keep it...), youtube, and maybe amazon prime.
So the purpose of this blog post will be to try to line out the requirements. Basically, what I want is to set this pc up as a kiosk that uses the TV as its monitor, using as many of the following:
- Running FreeBSD, and ZFS. I could run linux, but most of my infrastructure playbooks in ansible are geared toward FBSD.
- Lightweight X server that, preferably opens the browser (firefox?) full screen, and opens tabs for jellyfin, netflix, and prime. I plan to buy a TV media remote, one of them with the remote on the front and a keyboard on the back, though I would prefer to use the keyboard as little as possible, since it lowers the Spousal Approval Rating :D.
- I'd love to set up auto-login for the tvpc user, so that when it powers up, or after reboots, just comes up to the browser.
I'm considering using the i3 browser, if I can set the startup config, or if it remembers its previous configuration, which will only be the browser.
I have found the first possible hiccup. Apparently, netflix's DRM crap is closed source so is available on linux but not on FreeBSD...So I can set it up on the Brave browser in the linuxulator under FreeBSD. Or I could, like so many other things, drop it like a bad habit. Jellyfin runs fine under FreeBSD, because it is my own content on my own server. However, I found a howto on the freebsd forums to actually sets up brave in linuxulator, so I will probably be setting things up that way.
These are my initial thoughts. If anyone reading this blog has experience or suggestions of how to set this up, please comment below.
Cheers, Merry Christmas, and hope your holidays are joyous.