Installing a dedicated ICTV client

A dedicated ICTV client offers more features than directly using the webpage of a screen to display its content. It adds a local caching mechanism that ensures that previous content is kept across reboots. A client that cannot fetch new content from the server will display the past content and display a non-obtrusive error message.

A dedicated ICTV client also does not require direct access to the Internet. It only requires access to the ICTV server, which will serve all the assets needed by a client. This is a safer approach for deploying ICTV clients and is the recommended way.

ICTV has a built-in mechanism for easy deployment of clients. ICTV clients are meant to be run on x64 hardware. Once your ICTV server instance is deployed, you are ready to install and attach clients to it.

The installation is rather simple as it only consists of two steps:

  • Locate your client MAC address and associate it with a screen inside ICTV interface. Make sure to input the MAC of the interface your client will use to connect to the ICTV server.

The second step is OS-specific. Note that those two steps can be swapped, but you will need to restart the client after associating it with a screen inside ICTV.

Installing Fedora-based clients

  • Boot the client using a Fedora installation media and load the kickstart file served by your ICTV instance. Kickstart files are located under the /client/ks directory and are served by the webserver. If your server is HTTPS-enabled, use the HTTPS protocol when setting the kickstart file URL. Setting the kickstart file URL can be done from the command line when booting the installation media. Refer to the Fedora documentation for more details. Once the installation is complete, hit reboot.

Installing Ubuntu-based clients

Ubuntu sometimes offers better hardware support for 3D acceleration out of the box. ICTV can also be installed on Ubuntu clients.

  • Boot the client using a Ubuntu installation media and load the preseed configuration file served by your ICTV instance. It can be found in the /client/ks directory. Setting the preseed file is detailed in the Debian documentation.

Warning

If your server is HTTPS-enabled, you may have to add the debian-installer/allow_unauthenticated_ssl=true option to bypass certificate checks.

Restarting the client

The client can be restarted without a full reboot by restarting the systemd service xlogin@ictv. In the same manner, it can be stopped and started as necessary.