I made some tests yesterday on rpi1 that was laying around. raspbian jessie lite after boot consumes around 40MB of RAM. I installed xorg server and twm window manager and I tested two web browsers, Dillo and Midori. Dillo is extremely lightwaeight but is not powerful enough to display even basic UI … it consumed less that 100MB to launch Dillo. Midori is much better in diplaying basic UI and the whole system with midori consumed around 140MB of RAM. So the conclusion is that adding X server + lightweight web browser adds around 100MB of ram consumption.
Perhaps try Chromium (or lighter) without any window manager:
startx chromium --kiosk –
Purchase a Pine Rock64 board with 2GB or 4GB RAM. This accomplishes your request with the same form factor and ease of use. I use a 4GB model to run openhab, mopidy for Spotify interface in habpanel, zoneminder for ip cameras rtsp streams in habpanel and xfce desktop for habpanel display/control out to 6 touchscreens through an HDMI matrix. This is all from the Armbian Xenial image.
If you go the Android dongle route you will need one which supports the compatible android webview for full habpanel integration. If this is the case use Fully Kiosk Browser from play store.
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@Marcines, I am doing what you describe in your original question. I am no Pi expert but it seems to be working fine. It took a lot of work to setup. I installed Rasbian with a desktop, and then followed the Linux instructions to install OpenHAB, this is the time consuming part. My Pi has a touch screen, with Chromium running full screen displaying a HabPannel. I have never looked into the resources that are consumed on the Pi since it seems to be running just fine. I only have 2 dozen Z-Wave devices on OpenHab so far so maybe I am not pushing the limits yet. And the touch screen is very low resolution.
Thanks for all your suggestions guys. At this time I’m trying the path with R Pi only.
I’ve installed xserver and xinit:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg xinit
Then I was trying to instal Chromium with no window menager as @ikkeT suggested (thanks for the tip with skipping twm to save some resources).
sudo apt-get install chromium has failed, so I’ve installed Chromium this way:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser - this was fine
I can now run Chromium with this command: startx chromium-browser. Everything looks ok, but:
-
I can’t run Chromium in kiosk mode this way:
startx chromium-browser --kiosk http://openhabianpi:8080/habpanel/...X shuts down after a while with no error specified. I’ve spent some time googling what can be wrong but found nothing. Any advice here? -
Screen gets black after some time with on activity. How to disable this feature?
Everything works perfectly. Chromium can work on the same R Pi where OH2 works.
Running Chromium must be done from ~/.xinitrc file, not from command line directly.
The only thing to do now is to force the Openhabianpi to run Chromium browser on boot. Any advice?
would you please explain more?
how to run thru ~/.xinitrc
I run from your previous advise, Main screen of raspberry go black for 1 sec and back again with this report:
X.Org X Server 1.19.2
Release Date: 2017-03-02
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 4.9.41-v7+ armv7l Raspbian
Current Operating System: Linux openHABianPi 4.14.79-v7+ #1159 SMP Sun Nov 4 17:50:20 GMT 2018 armv7l
Kernel command line: 8250.nr_uarts=0 bcm2708_fb.fbwidth=1024 bcm2708_fb.fbheight=600 bcm2708_fb.fbdepth=16 bcm2708_fb.fbswap=1 vc_me m.mem_base=0x3f000000 vc_mem.mem_size=0x3f600000 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=7fba22c0-02 r ootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait
Build Date: 18 October 2017 04:55:30PM
xorg-server 2:1.19.2-1+rpt1+deb9u2 (https://www.debian.org/support)
Current version of pixman: 0.34.0
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
to make sure that you have the latest version.
Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sun Feb 3 09:45:21 2019
(==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d"
xinit: Unable to run program "/usr/bin/xterm": No such file or directory
Specify a program on the command line or make sure that /usr/bin
is in your path.
xinit: connection to X server lost
waiting for X server to shut down (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.
I am very interested in the topic. Are there any new experiences, e.g. with openHAB 3 or RasPi 4?
You just revived a 3yr old thread 
.
The basic situation has not changed and never will: openHAB is designed to run on a headless server and it does not make sense to co-install a browser on a box with limited memory (Raspberry, no matter what generation).
does not make sense to you. Great solution btw