Debian Browser Kiosk

Setting up a light weight desktop for web browsing using Debian 12 (Bookworm) with Proxmox LXC system containers.

Debian 12 with the xfce4 desktop environment and Google Chrome uses under 1.0GB of RAM and 1.2GB of disk.

Step 1: Create Proxmox LXC

Create a new LXC container using the debian-12-standard template. Provide a max of 4GB RAM and 5GB disk.

Step 2: Install XFCE4 and XRDP

In the Debian container run the following commands to install xfce4 and xrdp.

apt update; apt -y upgrade
apt install xfce4 xrdp
apt clean
adduser xrdp ssl-cert

# Create a limited user account for accessing the desktop
adduser rdp-user

Step 3: Connect to XFCE4 Desktop From Windows

From Windows, connect to the Debian instance using the mstsc client. Use the IP address of the Debian container and the username/password created earlier.

Step 4: Install Google Chrome

wget -O - https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub |  gpg --dearmor | tee /usr/share/keyrings/google-chrome.gpg >> /dev/null

echo deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/google-chrome.gpg] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main |  tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list

apt update; apt install google-chrome-stable; apt clean

Step 5: Disabling Copy/Paste over RDP

To disable copy/paste over RDP, in /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini disable allow_channels, set allow_channels=false. This will disable all RDP channels like clipboard sync, device redirection, etc.

References

Ubuntu GNOME Kiosk ubuntu-gnome-kiosk