SOS Public Kiosk 5.5 Release Notes

This document summarizes the changes and additions to the Science On a Sphere® (SOS) Public Kiosk (“Kiosk”) in the SOS 5.5.x Kiosk release.

The Kiosk software provides a touch screen controller running on Windows intended for a general public audience to interact with an SOS exhibit when there is no presenter available. The Kiosk provides a flexible and easy-to-administer public controller that can be localized to native languages by using standard SOS playlists.

For detailed information on setting up, customizing, and using the Kiosk, please refer to the SOS Public Kiosk Manual. Note that this manual includes instructions for using the media2kiosk utility, a command-line program that is installed on the SOS machines running Ubuntu along with the main SOS software. This utility is needed if you wish to tailor which datasets may be selected on your Kiosk.

Version 5.5.0

October 11, 2019

• SOS Public Kiosk 5.5.x requires Windows 7, 8, or 10
• This release is available upon request by emailing sos.support@noaa.gov. NOAA will provide Internet links to download a Kiosk installer program. This file is not obtainable using standard Ubuntu update management tools
• The Kiosk is installed on a Windows machine with touch screen by double clicking the downloaded installer program, setup.exe, and following the directions
• The default configuration of the kiosk files are automatically installed. If you have an existing kiosk configuration, the new one is merged into that. If you want to start with a new copy and default configuration of the latest kiosk software, you should uninstall your current version before installing the new one

• The default datasets installed with the kiosk were improved by adding some new datasets and a few dataset updates

• It was possible to launch multiple kiosk instances
• The kiosk can sometimes create an error popup in SOS Stream GUI on the SOS desktop

• Closing the SOS application while the kiosk application is running crashes the kiosk
• When setting a custom logo in kiosk.sos on the SOS machine using the media2kiosk utility, it isn’t put in the right place for the kiosk to read. It must be manually moved before transferring the customized files from the SOS machine to the kiosk