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Comment by Zekio | Hacker News Reader

1GB distro to display a full screen browser seems a bit excessive

Edit: there is a lite version at 557MB, didn't notice at first due to it having two dates in the name

I don't understand the effort here. Making an image implies supporting it; does the author really think it's going to be worth his time to "support" what is surely a couple of bash scripts wrapped up in 600MB of OS?

It seems like a simple how-to blog post would have been more appropriate.

It requires you provide it with a zipped Raspbian image. It takes that image, and injects a few scripts, and configures them to run at boot.

Here's the scripts:

https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS/blob/devel/src/fullpag...

https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS/blob/devel/src/common....

https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS/blob/devel/src/config

Indeed, its what lets us release a new version in OctoPi within hours of announcements on raspberrypi.org. I am also working on adding other devices support using Armbian.

They seem to have a goal they've completely forgotten to mention. Moving all the settings into a textfile in /boot means you can bring this up from a windows machine (/boot is fat rather than ext2/3/4 due to limitations in the firmware that seek the bootcode).

So on a windows or mac machine (or pretty much any OS that can handle an SD card in the first place), you can write the image, edit the settings on the card, then stick it in the pi & have it up and running. The methods that most of us would use to do this manually, are near impossible to preflight from an OS that doesn't support ext2/3/4.

Developer here. Well, people are using it. And the power of this is that I can accept pull requests, and have nightly builds. OctoPi, my distro before this got 100k downloads because of this fact. I made it because I needed it, and others need it too. I have three collaborators with me who made the dashboard app.

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