Add industrial/POS installation flavor

[atone]

This is more of an idea or feedback than a requirement. I know you guys are struggling with community engagement and support/donations, and I plan to help myself because I love what you do and find it exciting.

 

I work for a company in the industrial automation field and last year a small revolution picked up. At the SPS in Nürnberg/Germany (the biggest European fair in our field) last November, a ton of industrial hardware constructors unveiled their new ARM-based compact devices running Linux: essentially modified SBCs. This is really unusual because industrial automation has been traditionally more oriented toward Microsoft. But thanks to different technological evolutions that have occurred in recent years, Linux has become more accessible to machine constructors with less know-how in software development and Linux. What I mean is that I see the opportunity that you guys attract this kind of people and companies who have money and can financially support you with Armbian.

 

My experience with Armbian has been so far positive in this context. What I'm missing is a more industrial flavored installation. CLI is perfect for devices without a monitor. For HMI and POS, Desktop is already overkill. For this kind of application (HMI and POS) it would be perfect to have a Debian based installation with the following software working OOB:

• Terminal
• SSH
• VNC
• XFCE
• Text editor (i.e. nano)
• Chromium
• Git
• Docker

 

There is no need of things like:

• Kernel headers
• LibreOffice
• Thunderbird
• Firefox
• FileZilla
• Gimp
• VIM
• VPN
• IPTV
• Plex
• Cloud
• ...

 

It would also be absolutely perfect to have the ability to start a GUI application with arguments, i.e. from armbianEnv.txt (i.e. Chromium in kiosk mode with a URL), or the ability to configure it from armbian-config.

 

This is another topic, but related: I also see a lot of confusion on the forum (I was confused too) between enabling the desktop and auto-login. Currently the auto-login feature is hidden behind "Enable desktop" in armbian-config. In a first step, I would extend the menu description to "Enable desktop or auto-login" to make it clearer. In a second step, I would provide the possibility to enable/disable the auto-login independently from the desktop.

 

I hope you guys appreciate these feedabacks and I'm sorry that I can't immediately help with developing features and solving issues, my know-how with Bash, Linux and GitHub is too limited. But I hope to be able to fill this gap quickly.