14 DAY TRIAL // Porteus Linux developer Tomasz Jokiel announced today the release and general availability of the Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0 Gentoo-based operating system designed for public access computers.
Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.14.50 kernel, Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0 is the second release of the operating system in 2018 and comes five months after version 4.6 to introduce more mitigations against the Spectre security vulnerabilities, though the next-gen Spectre flaws require microcode firmware updates for Intel CPUs.
"Newly discovered "Spectre Next Generation" vulnerabilities require updated microcode from Intel which is not available yet. Please consider enabling automatic updates service for your kiosks to receive latest fixes and patches as soon as they become available," reads today's announcement.
Here's what's new in Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0
Highlights of the Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0 release include the ability to set the shutdown options for rebooting the kiosk or restarting the session, support for refreshing a web page at a predefined time interval, which could be useful for digital signage purposes, as well as support for redirecting USB devices to Citrix sessions by default.
Another interesting feature implemented in this release is the splitting of the screen rotation function from "screen_settings" parameter to make it easier for users to rotate the screen on various kiosk setups. Also, the "TearFree" and "DRI3" features were enabled by default on the Intel graphics driver for smoother video playback and screen scrolling.
The Wake On LAN function has been updated as well in Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0 to allow users to use it for waking up kiosks that are in other subnets than were the Porteus Kiosk server is located, and a new "Send notification" action was added to the Administration Panel to let sysadmins send a message to multiple clients.
There's also a new "History" function added to the "Send custom command" action in the Administration Panel for re-running previously executed commands. Of course, Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0 includes numerous other bug fixes and performance improvements, so it's a recommended update for all existing users. Download Porteus Kiosk 4.7.0.