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Linux Digital Signage Deployment Guide
Linux Digital Signage Deployment Guide

A step-by-step guide for setting up TelemetryTV on Ubuntu

Gersham Meharg avatar
Written by Gersham Meharg
Updated over a week ago

In this article we provide a step-by-step guide for setting up your digital signage with Linux devices.

TelemetryTV has a snap available on the Snapcraft store. This application allows you to turn any computer running Linux into a digital signage player.

What devices does this include?

Intel NUC, Mini PC, Video Wall Intel NUC, + more.
​See our hardware page for a list of all recommended devices.

What are the advantages of using Linux with these devices?

  • Nearly as widely available and customizable as Windows devices, without the added cost of a Windows license

What are the disadvantages of using Linux with these devices?

  • Not ideal for deploying at scale

  • Ease of setup is largely dependent on device model, it may require some technical expertise if the hardware isn't supported out of the box.

Setting up TelemetryTV on Ubuntu

1.    Acquire the TelemetryTV snap via either:

  • A direct download from the Snapcraft store.
    or

  • Running the following from the terminal:

sudo snap install telemetrytv

2.    Set TelemetryTV to run on boot:

  • First, create a user to be used as the kiosk account.

Head to account settings by clicking the icons on the top right > selecting your account name > Account Settings

Then, hit Unlock on the top right and enter your admin password. From there, hit  Add User, and add a user with Automatic Login turned ON

  • Then, login to the kiosk user and add the below .desktop file at ~/.config/autostart/snap.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=snap run telemetrytv
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=TelemetryTV
Name=TelemetryTV
Comment[en_US]=
Comment=

3.   Automatic Provisioning (optional)

To have a device automatically pair to a specific account and playlist when running Telemetry, the snap needs to be run with a provisioning argument.

snap run telemetrytv --provision=YOURPROVISIONINGTOKEN

Your provisioning tokens can be found under Settings > Provisioning Tokens.

Note: TelemetryTV can be run in kiosk mode with the provisioning token by changing the line 

Exec=snap run telemetrytv

in the above ~/.config/autostart/snap.desktop to include the token (as below):

Exec=snap run telemetrytv --provision=YOURPROVISIONINGTOKEN
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