How to ruin the Kali distribution by making it usable for day-to-day use
Disclaimer: Kali is meant to be secure, not convenient. The reader should note that messing with Kali as described in this article means to sacrifice some of that security. If, Like me, you don’t use Kali in a professional capacity, then this is probably a fair trade.
I recently switch from Parrot to Kali, and the first thing i noticed was that Kali takes itself much more seriously. There’s no Office suite, and the only browser in the Kali repos is Firefox ESR.
I decided to make some minor adjustments to improve my quality of life.
Installing Chrome
I’m sure half of you reading just recoiled in disgust. Allow me to defend myself:
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It’s fast
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It’s easier to set-up across all of my devices
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I’m just a student. This machine isn’t being held to the same security standards as someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
It’s fairly straightforward.
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install gdebi
apt-get install gdebi
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install chrome
gdebi google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
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If you run Kali as root, Then chrome will complain that this is a horrible idea (spoiler: it is.) Fortunately, this is easy to remedy.
First, We add a new user just for chrome
adduser chromeuser
Next, edit /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop and change every Exec= line by prepending sudo -u chromeuser. Now every time you launch chrome from dash2dock.
You also need to give xhost permissions to chromeuser’s applications, otherwise Chrome won’t be able to connect to the xserver and can’t spawn windows. I did this by editing my ~/.bashrc file and adding the line:
xhost +SI:localuser:chromeuser
This will add only chromeuser to the xserver ACL. This is probably safer than adding all local users with xhost local:. you can check which users are authorized by running xhost.
Now, whenever you launch chrome from dash2dock or the desktop it’ll run as an unpriviledged user.
Note: The other way to do this, if you absolutely must run Chrome as root, is to append --no-sandbox instead of sudo. Don’t do this.