Cast dashboard on old iPads [iHost]

Ideas & Suggestion
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I want to share with the community a useful way to resume an old iPad as a Cast display.
In my house I’ve an old iPad 2 and a iPad mini 2, both stuck with iOS 9.x.

Safari is too old to run the Cast dashboard but I’ve found a trick.

You can install a docker named jlesage/firefox on your iHost that will run a new version of Firefox on the iHost itself. It’ll be exposed through a VNC connection to your old browser and this seems to work quite good.

I’ll share my env variables:

FF_KIOSK=1 (to make Firefox fullscreen)
DARK_MODE=1 (my preferred mode :slight_smile:)
KEEP_APP_RUNNING=1 (to restart Firefox in case of an unexpected crash)
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 (my native language)
FF_OPEN_URL=http://172.16.0.126/cast/ (the address of my ihost cast dashboard)

You should also connect a volume to persist browser cache and expose port 5800 et voilà: you can now address your iHost IP address with port 5800 and use your cast dashboard on an old iPad!

I hope this will be useful for someone of you.

You can find more documentation of the docker here: GitHub - jlesage/docker-firefox: Docker container for Firefox

Best

3 Likes
2

Seems awsome, will try later.

I have installed the addon tailscale to access my iHost remotely and using Full kiosk to display my iHost CAST dashboard in full screen. :grinning:

1 Like
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Hey, do you mind sharing more details about your setup? I wan’t to do something similar.

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Check out Fully Kiosk