Microsoft's monopoly on PCs

Webconverger supplies the complete stack. Webconverger has no software dependencies. Our competitors such as KioWare and SiteKiosk require Windows.

A Windows license can cost 100USD or more alone, however unfortunately for us, the price is bundled in the price of a PC and most people don't see it.

So I wish I could add the cost of Windows (~100USD) plus the cost of licencing a competitor's software (~100USD) and compare that to Webconverger's base 100USD a year. Though as I mentioned before, most system integrators are not going to notice the Windows license as its very hard to get that money back.

Ignoring the expense of Windows makes it difficult for us to undercut KioWare & SiteKiosk directly on price, although we do have more to offer.

Webconverger is cheaper if you count the real cost of Windows computing.

Ease of install

You can boot Webconverger and configure it with our new service in about 10 minutes, or less if you already have a Paypal account. (Re-)Installing Windows can take hours.

We can even help you go faster here if you give us a bulk CSV of your machine identifiers.

Webconverger saves you time.

Performance

Customers have said Windows plus competitors' software are resource hogs and this is no surprise to us. Webconverger runs far more efficiently on PCs. We've heard of customers not rolling out new HTML5 enabled sites because their Windows kiosk software was holding them back. Now they are using Webconverger and they are free to improve their customer experiences using the latest Firefox technologies.

Webconverger delivers the Web better on PCs.

No Windows BSODs and proven stability

It's difficult to empirically prove that Linux powered Webconverger is more stable than Windows plus competitors' software, though bear in mind that our software stack is minimized to provide a great browsing experience on PCs. Windows plus competitors' software is far bigger and complex stack for bugs to bite.

Our software is proven to be mission critical. Webconverger runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week in the city of London.

Webconverger is reliable.

Open source software security

Indeed there is a debate raging on the merits of Open source software security . Windows' fine grained security features leveraged by our competitors is undeniably good. And we must be careful to acknowledge that if an attacker has unchecked physical access to the machine, it can be "cracked". For example by resetting the BIOS settings by removing the battery. Nonetheless Webconverger is competitive.

Our security policy invites security experts for review and our design is such that to facilitate security in layers. Our "live version" is particularly good and received acclaim and our in development "install version" will introduce checks to verify the signed git tags.

Our current upgrade process is straightforward (re-image the USB stick) however we plan to make it even easier with git based upgrades. This feature is not ready yet, though our attitude to security and privacy is very proactive and transparent.

Webconverger is security concious.

5 reasons to support Webconverger

Please download Webconverger to give your users better access to the Web, whilst saving you time, money and giving you piece of mind that Webconverger is both opensource and competitive.

Download 405650a01f00fe9d37e6916065985e5a webc-12.3.iso

12.3 is another hugely exciting release for us.

A simple installer to enable the "install version"

Selecting the new installer option from the boot menu will wipe the contents of your hard disk and put Webconverger on it. This is fantastic for large installs. Since most machines come with a hard drive, you can go around armed with a USB key with 12.3 on it and get each machine converted to a public Web kiosk in 5 minutes. The speed is largely dependent on how fast the disk is.

Note that once converted (Webconverger is installed), there is no undo switch, you need to re-install the operating system on there previously. Therefore if you have any doubt, please stick with the live version. It's designed not to touch your hard drive. The live version is perfect for deployments where you might just want to turn your PC into a kiosk temporarily.

The "install version" is what version of Webconverger you get when you boot from the hard disk instead of say a USB stick or CD-ROM. The "install version" can save the configuration which now enables wireless configurations in your subscription!

If the configuration service goes down you will still be able to surf quickly

We have fixed some important issues surrounding the configuration service and the way the client retrieves a configuration from us. If http://config.webconverger.com/ is blocked on your network for example, Webconverger will now timeout after 15 seconds. Previously this would take much longer thanks to the wget default retry behaviour that took us off guard.

We do have further issues to resolve here to make sure if our service goes down for whatever reason, it can bring up your configuration at a later stage. An install version however will have the configuration saved making it far more resilient than the live version.

There are no package changes between 12.2 & 12.3 hence there is no package diff. Though we did manage to shed almost 200M from the previous 12.2 (containing a .git/ with all objects) release and there are changes in the kiosk extension to disable about:home which could potentially be a vector for attack and breaking out the lock down.

Being aware of risks to your privacy which we care a LOT about

We enabled updates.sh which allows us to run arbitary signed code on the client. This let me remind you is true of any other update system in any other operating system. The difference here is we are being transparent about it.

This script gives us flexibility for supporting customers, such as being able to collect logs to debug issues. Of course this is a privacy concern since we could "after the fact" install code to monitor a browsing session, which you will have to trust us, we won't do.

You can disable this by appending noupdates to boot command line
You could block http://updates.webconverger.com

How do you know what we are doing to your machine? If you know your UUID, you can visit http://updates.webconverger.com/YOUR_UUID/manifest To see what code would be run on startup.

We also added some code to check if the signing keys have been revoked, so that if something happens to the key, we can disable them to limit any potential "what if these keys fell in the wrong hands" scenarios.

If you think we have made a mistake with our security approach or it can be better, please let us know.

The significance of the "install version"

The "install version" means we can write to your disk, save configurations and in the future keep you better updated, making your users happier and safer.

In a series where I hope to get you excited about the innovations Webconverger are doing, I'm going to profile what possibilities a git maintained rootfs can realise.

The ugly truth with all Linux distributions except Webconverger is that downgrading is non-trivial. You can only "upgrade" your way out of trouble. You could fetch old packages from say http://snapshot.debian.org though you could get easily run into some dependency problem. Then once you've managed to downgrade you need to put holds on the downgraded which then you probably forget about them and wonder why things don't properly upgrade from there.

Just imagine a downgrade is as simple as a git revert... well it is with Webconverger!

Take this particular issue #16 as an example. I performed an upgrade which was found to be the cause of font rendering problems, which incidentally corresponded to Debian bug 666736. I simply reverted that particular change and now we are back on track for a new release with another innovation.

Webconverger 12 booted with default settings

Webconverger 12 is the biggest leap forward this project has made to date. Highlights:

Operating system innovation, entire operating system is now maintained under git (we believe this is a first!)
New configuration and subscription service at making it much easier to customise your kiosk
New boot menu, with the ability to boot in a selection of different locales
Firefox 10 Extended Support Release 10.0.3 included
A new about: page that shows the running version of Webconverger
For added security please upgrade since we now have better browser lock down in the Webconverger Firefox extension and no more search bar
Much better network handling
Re-engineering of boot APIs like i18n
kioskresetstation works with blanking
Incredible amount of hard open sourced work documented on https://github.com/Webconverger/
12.0 package changes

Update:

12.1 hotfix for bug in configuration fetching loop
12.2 Critical Flash security update and other fixes

Download from your closest mirror md5sum 83c1addc980455898c69165d05d3d7b0 webc-12.2.iso

New configuration service offering from Webconverger.com

As we announced earlier this replaces http://webconverger.com/buy customisation service which simply wasn't scalable. There is an extensive FAQ describing the service, though the biggest caveat is that it only works on wired network connections on this Live version.

To give you an idea of how painless it is now to subscribe to the service, please see this video on subscribing and how easy it is to unsubscribe.

Last but not least, http://webconverger.com also has a new HTML digital signage product based on Webconverger called Neon that is on the streets of the London now and will be used at the Olympic games. Open technologies FTW!

A binary operating system in git

We have laid down the foundations for an operating system entirely managed in git. There is a lot more innovation to come in form of upgrades and getting the size down of the ISO down. So we really need your feedback and support in future rounds of testing hard drive installs since this is new territory.

Special thanks to Patrick Haller, Jamie Kitson, Guttorm Flatabø, Ruth Chong and Paul Craig for your help, duly acknowledged.

Linux + HTML5 = Webconverger

11.0 was a great & popular release. Thank you! 11.2 builds on that with:

Firefox 10
Linux 3.2 with TCP Proportional Rate Reduction
Removal of confusing tab groups from Firefox, making things simpler
Stop accidental downloads of unknown mimetypes, therefore saving precious bandwidth
For developers: Build upgraded to live build a42 from Debian Live and source has moved to Github
10 second retry on net Error, for cases where network isn't quite ready
More (non-free) wireless firmware: realtek, libertas, brcm80211 & atheros, means your wireless kiosk will almost certainly work

Please check out the 11.2 package changes, compared to the previous 11.0 release.

Making upgrading to the latest releases easier

Webconverger strives to be a simple secure kiosk solution. Saving you time and headaches. Although Webconverger is well protected (being read only for example) from many browser vulnerabilities that arise, it is still best security practice to be up to date. Not only that, your users will appreciate the better HTML5 support and speed improvements in Firefox.

We know that upgrading Webconverger is painful with these frequent releases & no automatic updating:

Download latest ISO from http://download.webconverger.com/
Re-imaging USB stick or burning entirely new CD
Re-deploying to physical machines

Conservative customised users are often much less enthusiastic about the upgrade process above and can't easily justify the full cost.

Firstly Webconverger will reduce the cost of an image update to existing customers by 50%, providing there are no additional customisations and the customer is kind enough to provide a testimonial. So a photo of Webconverger (could be anonymous) in use in your institution and 50GBP if you have already had a customised image, based say on version 10, that you want today on 11.2.

The order form will be updated soon to reflect this new strategy.

Moving to a subscription based model and to a sustainable future

In the next weeks a new development project will kick off whereby we will enable some persistence (saves the updates, i.e. not read only anymore) in the USB images to enable efficient updates to the squashfs images of Webconverger. Here the business model will be a subscription based one. Further details such as the price of such a convenient service has not been finalised.

Webconverger as a business needs a regular income and I hope you can understand and support this direction. Any questions or comments? Please email feedback2012@webconverger.com.

Image credits, Ruth Chong used:

Linux Tux
HTML5 logo

I'm very proud to announce Webconverger 11, with the following improvements:

Firefox 9
Ability to change browser chrome options at boot time!
Quieter boots
Several enhancements on the Firefox Webconverger extension, many thanks to Mike Kaply
Security tweaks to make the control script harder to override
New logo and site design, thanks Patric!
Networking interface naming bug spotted by Stewart and fixed by Matthijs Kooijman

11.0 package changes, compared to the previous release.

sha1sum: 1b709cac372bfdffb2893551e4fd92700cad037b  webc-11.0.iso
md5sum: 7d2984d03a7375b04af5f38859988636  webc-11.0.iso

Do have a look at our new public statistics site http://ping.webconverger.org, detailing Webconverger usage.

New users please download Webconverger and test out if it's a good public kiosk solution for your community. We have a friendly support group if you have any questions!

Commercial users, please place your order on the brand new, easier to use, order form. Thank you,

Happy new year 2012! As I prepare a Firefox 9 based release which is already available in daily builds for testing, lets introduce a feature I failed to document on Webconverger 10 release, USB tethering in this 10.2 change.

When you plug in a suitable USB network device that comes up as usb0 and has a simple dhcp mechanism, like the Android USB Tethering feature, Webconverger will detect and use this network interface.

This can unfortunately be a little fiddly since Android disables the USB tethering if it doesn't detect the USB connection, for example when a kiosk is turned off. Therefore on Android you need to turn on the tethering feature everytime on booting Webconverger. Other USB dongles might have a better experience.

Nonetheless with a USB stick with Webconverger, a microUSB cable & an Android phone (with a data plan) you can setup a kiosk pretty much anywhere. Think outdoors during a public fête, a local community site could be introduced from a laptop.

Next year February will mark oddly the 5th year of this opensource project and software business.

Without further delay may I present Webconverger 10 with an accompanying site redesign by Patric Schwarz. If you notice any issues with the site or Webconverger, please use the feedback email address at the bottom of the page.

At 9.0-10.2 you will notice the usual flash update, Firefox 8, additional firmware for ralink wireless and quite a few removed packages.

The removed packages are mostly unnecessary for trying Webconverger. I think it's better to customise Webconverger with your chosen locale than altering the boot menu and then choosing the appropriate dictionary once Webconverger is booted. Likewise printing is best left as a customisation option, as it makes the initial download a bit too bulky otherwise.

10.2's sha1sum is 8f0770175c2b237814715ce7e4ccd99044502d10 and you can download it here.

There are a couple of other additions in this release that warrant blog posts in the new year. 2011 has been a very busy year for me personally. The good news is that I hope to spend much more time with Webconverger in 2012.

Here is to a successful 2012 for you and Webconverger! Cheers

H-online's coverage of this release milestone