Why SteadyScreen

Built for screens nobody is watching over

Most display software assumes someone is nearby to fix it. These machines sit in shops where the person on site cannot help, so the failure modes matter more than the feature list.

Boots straight to your content

Power on and the screen shows your page. No desktop, no login prompt, no operating-system text scrolling past — every step of the boot is painted deliberately, so customers never see the machinery.

Survives the plug being pulled

Staff switch off at the door. SteadyScreen expects that: there is no shutdown ritual to remember and no one has to restart anything in the morning.

Prints straight from the page

Tickets, coupons, receipts and labels come off a thermal printer directly from the screen — no print dialog, no margins, no header or footer.

Runs on hardware you already own

768 MB of RAM and an 8 GB disk are enough. That old machine in the back office is usually the point, not a problem.

Touch or no touch

Interactive kiosks take touch input where the panel has an in-kernel driver. Menu boards and marketing screens hide the pointer and controls entirely, so there is nothing to fiddle with.

Rolls out without a technician

Put an answer file on the stick and it installs with no questions — disk, display name, URL and Wi-Fi all pre-set. One stick does a whole chain of stores.

In development

Coming: central management

Every display is managed today from its own admin page on your network, and needs nothing else. For estates that outgrow visiting each screen, a central server is being built.

Nothing to open on the store's networkDisplays check in outbound, on their own. No inbound ports, no port forwarding, and it survives the site changing address.
The whole estate on one screenVersion, uptime, what each display is showing, and whether it is healthy — without ringing the store to ask.
Change one screen or a whole chainPush a new URL or restart a display from where you are, instead of driving to it.
No remote shell, deliberatelyA deliberately narrow command set. If the server were ever compromised, the worst case is the wrong page on some screens — not arbitrary code on every display you own.
Local changes still win when they need toSomeone standing at the display can still change it. That change is honoured and reconciled afterwards, not silently overwritten.

None of this has shipped yet, and nothing above depends on it — the displays described on this page install and run today without any server at all. Watch this space for updates.

Where it runs

One platform, several jobs

Menu boards

Your menu, pricing and specials on the wall, driven by a web page you already control. Change the page and every board follows. No pointer, no controls, nothing for a customer to press.

Marketing & promotional displays

Window displays, in-store promotions, waiting-room and lobby screens. Point it at a URL and it holds that page indefinitely, unattended, for as long as the screen is powered.

Self-service kiosks

Price checkers, order and lookup stations, check-in terminals. Add a touchscreen and a thermal printer and the same machine takes input and hands the customer paper.

Printing

Hand the customer a piece of paper

A kiosk that can only show things is half a kiosk. SteadyScreen prints tickets, coupons, receipts, labels and order slips straight from the page on screen — no print dialog for a customer to get stuck in, no margins, no browser header or footer. What the page renders is what comes out of the printer.

What you can attach
Printer	Supported	Notes
ESC/POS thermal printers, any make	Yes	Epson, Bixolon, Star in ESC/POS mode and generic 58 mm / 80 mm units — one built-in driver covers the whole class, with no vendor software to install.
AirPrint / IPP Everywhere printers	Yes	Discovered on the network and added by address. No driver needed.
Inkjets and lasers needing a vendor driver	No	Deliberately not included — the image ships no vendor drivers, which is what keeps it small enough to run on old hardware.

Thermal printers are supported by class rather than by model, so there is no vendor driver to chase and no per-model licence — 58 mm and 80 mm paper are both handled at full width.

A built-in test print proves the whole path end to end, and refuses with a clear error rather than quietly feeding blank paper when something is wrong.

Install

From bare machine to running display

Two ways to install: write a USB stick and boot an old PC from it, or convert a Windows machine you are already running. Both take about five minutes and end at the same display.

One USB stick, about five minutes, no internet connection needed. The installer wipes the whole target disk — there is no dual-boot option and no resize.

Download the installer

Version 1.15.13 · 804 MB compressed image · hosted on GitHub

The release page carries the .img.xz image and a SHA256SUMS file. You do not need to unpack the image — BalenaEtcher writes the compressed file directly.

The version above is the software the image ships with. A newly installed display updates itself to the current release on its first nightly update — or right away, from its own admin page.

Flash the stick

Write the compressed image to a USB stick with BalenaEtcher — no unpacking needed. Two notes worth passing to whoever does it: say no when Windows offers to format the stick.

Boot it and answer one question

Which disk to erase — and it asks you to type that disk's name back to confirm. Nothing else is asked, because everything else is set later from the display itself. It takes about five minutes and needs no internet connection, and the installer never offers the stick it booted from as a target.

Leave it alone

It writes the disk, gives the machine its own identity and keys, and restarts into a setup screen that tells whoever is standing there where to go to configure it. Once it is pointed at your page, that is what it loads on every power cycle after that.

What it runs on

These are the specifications we support, set with headroom rather than at the floor.

Minimum system requirements
Component	Minimum	Notes
RAM	768 MB	Recommended, not a floor — a stick install enforces no RAM minimum and runs on less. The client itself is about 240 MB; with the browser and X on top, a display in service sits around 550 MB.
Disk	8 GB	Leaves room for updates and the spare boot slot.
CPU	64-bit x86	Any vintage since roughly 2006. 32-bit firmware does not mean a 32-bit CPU — those machines are supported.
Firmware	BIOS / UEFI 32 / UEFI 64	All three boot from one stick. On 64-bit UEFI, Secure Boot can stay on — a stick written from the current download boots through shim and a Debian-signed GRUB, the same chain as the Windows installer. 32-bit UEFI is unsigned, so those machines still need it off.
Network	Not needed to install	Needed to load the page once running.
Input	None required	Menu boards and marketing displays hide the controls entirely.

Graphics need a KMS driver, which every Intel, AMD and NVIDIA chipset of that era has. Touch panels with in-kernel drivers work untouched.

Before you start

Secure Boot — on a 32-bit UEFI machine, turn it off. On 64-bit UEFI it can stay on. If a 64-bit UEFI machine with Secure Boot on does not show the stick in its boot menu, the stick is older than the signed bootloader — write it again from the current download, rather than turning Secure Boot off.
The whole target disk is erased. Back up anything on it first.
You need a 2 GB or larger USB stick to write the installer to.

Writing the stick

Write the .img.xz to the stick with BalenaEtcher. It handles the compressed file directly — there is nothing to unpack.
Windows will offer to format the stick when Etcher finishes. Say no. The stick is partitioned for Linux and Windows cannot read it. This looks like a failure and is not one.

After the install

The machine restarts into a setup screen that tells you the address to open to configure it. An unconfigured display saying so on screen is the expected state, not a fault.
Point it at your page from there. After that it loads your page on every power cycle, with nobody needing to touch it.
Everything else — the URL, Wi-Fi, rotation, printers — is set from the display's own admin page on your network. See the demo.

Already running Windows? Convert the machine where it stands — no USB stick, and nobody has to walk to it. One line in an elevated PowerShell downloads the installer and turns the PC into a display.

Run this in an elevated PowerShell

Open PowerShell as administrator — right-click it and choose Run as administrator — then paste:

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol=3072; irm https://steadyscreen.com/win | iex

Shorter, if you would rather remember one line — but on older Windows it can stop before it downloads anything with Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel. If you see that, use the line above.

irm https://steadyscreen.com/win | iex

Which Windows it runs on

Tested Windows versions
Windows	Works	Notes
11 and 10	Yes	Either command.
8.1	Yes	Proven on a live store machine. Use the first command.
7 and older	No	The tools it needs did not exist yet — use the USB stick.

What it needs

64-bit UEFI Windows. A BIOS or 32-bit UEFI machine is not covered here — use the USB stick, which boots all three.
Secure Boot can stay on. Nobody has to go into the firmware: it installs with Secure Boot left on, including the machines that shipped with Windows 11. (64-bit x86 only.)
About 1 GB of RAM and an 8 GB or larger disk.
A network connection — it downloads about 750 MB.
BitLocker, if it is on, is suspended for one reboot, never decrypted.

What happens when you run it

It checks the machine first and shows the result as a checklist. The wipe warning only appears once it knows the machine can be installed.
It downloads the installer and checks every file against its published checksum before anything touches the disk.
If something goes wrong before the point of no return, the machine boots back into Windows untouched.
When it finishes, the PC restarts into the same setup screen as a USB install and loads your page from then on.

If a command is refused

Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel — use the first (longer) command.
… running scripts is disabled on this system — run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process Bypass -Force first. It applies only to that one PowerShell window and changes nothing permanently.

Wipes this computer

This erases the computer you run it on

The command behind this warning wipes the entire disk of the Windows machine you run it on. There is no undo, no dual-boot, and no way back to the previous system. Only continue on a machine whose contents you no longer need.

I understand this will permanently erase this computer, and I have backed up anything I need to keep.

Tick the box to reveal the installation command.

Rollouts

Unattended install, for more than one screen

Configuring each display by hand is fine for one screen. For a chain of stores it is not. Put a short answer file on the stick and the installer stops asking entirely: it partitions, installs, names the machine, joins Wi-Fi and comes up on your page with nobody watching — no setup screen, no second visit. The same stick does every site.

KIOSK-CFG / kiosk-answers.conf

UNATTENDED=yes
TARGET_DISK=auto
KIOSK_NAME=kiosk-saltwater
KIOSK_URL=https://example.com/signage/today.html
WIFI_SSID=SaltwaterSurf
WIFI_PSK=…

Editable in the field

The answer file lives on its own FAT32 partition, so it can be edited on the spot from Windows, macOS or Linux — no Linux machine and no re-imaging to change a store name or a URL.

It refuses to guess

TARGET_DISK=auto installs only when exactly one disk qualifies. If a machine has two, it stops rather than erasing the wrong one.

Safe by default

Release images ship with no answer file, so a stick always asks which disk to erase. An unattended stick installs with no questions at all — which is exactly why it should not be the one carried loose in a bag.

Contact

Screens that stay up.