I recently got a couple of POS pc’s (Point of sale) you know the ones that are all in one with a base to sit on a counter. The thing is they’re very old non branded devices, even the label says 2GB DDR2 while it’s actually 4GB DDR3.
Anyway, first thing I did was plug in my Ventoy and boot Debian 12 live, and guess what? Everything just works! Even the touchscreen works.
What distro do you recommend? Will be using them in a small shop with Odoo (browser based ERP)
Sorry if my writing is messed up, English is my second language.
EDIT: thank all for your input really appreciate it. I think I’m going to go with the majority of recommendations and use Debian 12 with xfce maybe. At least until I’m comfortable using immutable OS’s.
Personal opinion. If you successfully booted Debian, stick with it. No need to try out a bunch of distros. Debian is well known, well supported, tons of resources AND everything works out of the box with your POS systems. Sold!
Sold!
Heh, well done fellow internet person.
Glad you liked it fellow inter webs person!
Sold!
Can I get a recipet please?
Thank you, all great points and I’m gonna go with Debian and xfce as DE to keep light.
I read that as “Distro for Piece of Shit”. I was going to say, if you dont like them, install Gentoo.
Personally i tend to use Debian or Fedora. Fedora have also got a few distros that are immutable which if its a pos basically means it shouldnt ever break or get corrupted.
That being said… If it works, dont ‘fix’ it. Debian is a decent OS.
I read that as “Distro for Piece of Shit”. I was going to say, if you dont like them, install Gentoo.
Or even better: Linux From Scratch, or
busyboxbuildrootTbh when I was thinking of the title that’s what came to mind, sorry for being clickbaity haha. Immutable OS’s have been on my radar for a while I just need to be a bit confident in using them before going live.
Immutables are easy enough. Had a couple of months on the kde fedora spin. Fresh install and youll have no dnf (equiv of apt in debian) or other terminal tools. Might make you wonder what to do. The trick is toolboxes (or distrobox for a bit more umpfh).
Commands like this
toolbox create testzone
toolbox enter testzone
Install a load of shit that eventually fucks up your config somehow… And if it goes to shit
toolbox rm testzone
If it complains the toolbox is still running when you try to delete you can kill it using podman to find its process id, then you can kill it. I forget the commands though
You can have a stack of toolboxes. Gives you dnf and all your terminal tools. Still a few things to work out with data storage since it locks most of the root directories. It wants you in best practice dirs like /home, /etc but thats also what stops it breaking.
If a toolbox isnt enough, you can use distrobox, which can give you other flavours of *nix within it.
Good luck!!
Thank you for the detailed reply, you got me excited to spin a VM with Fedora Silver Blue and break it
If the erp is Browser based then a lightweight distro with a Browser of your choice. Like Debian.
If you’ll be using it in a shop, as a tool and that Debian works well. Well… stick with Debian !
Don’t you have any other requirements for a POS? Like connecting a card reader, special software etc. Those will probably be your main problem, not the OS.
Luckily no. Only a barcode reader and a receipt printer.
This guy cryptos
Maybe a kiosk compositor which displays only a single app works well for this use case.
I’ve never known a such thing exists, thank you so much for sharing it. Gonna test it out this weekend.
Maybe debian or fedora, something that isn’t too advanced
if it is for a small shop, whatever you’re used to.
For mass deployment, you’ll want to probably use something with proper support
Yes, SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service often ends up being a source of “Linux in the wild” posts.
Gonna agree with the others here.
Stick to Debian. Especially for the stated use. A slow-moving distro with very few surprises is perfect.
Are you planning on using them as a pos? I’m not sure if an open pos os exists
Yeah, but the software is self hosted and accesed via browser. I think I’m going with everyone’s recommendations and going Debian.
Fedora Atomic (Silverblue, etc.), with either KDE or Gnome.
Both look modern and should work on the hardware, and no customer can fuck it up
I’m not sure how well maintained it is, but porteus-kiosk might ve a very good fit for this use case…
Does Odoo need a desktop? If not you could run chromium or Firefox in fullscreen. Just make sure you restrict what pages the user can visit. You don’t want them to have full control.
For management you should setup SSH at the minimum with a key that is on a device that you use for administration. You should also setup unattended upgrades and maybe even a web interface like like cockpit.
If you want to save yourself some time you could create a image and then image all of the boot drives.
Those are great points. Thank you, especially reminding me to setup SSH, I would absolutely forget it and never get to doing it haha
