How to setup RHEL 8 to run as a kiosk

November 24, 2021 1 minute read

How to setup RHEL 8 to run as a kiosk

While investigate how to setup a PC as a kiosk, I found this blog post describing this RHEL 8 feature. It basically run a minimum Gnome desktop, autologin as the kiosk user and launch the kiosk app. It also disabled the Crtl + Alt + F# key combination to switch to another virtual terminal.

To summarize:

Create a dedicated kiosk user
```
useradd kioskuser
```

Install the requred packages

yum install -y gnome-session-kiosk-session gdm firefox

Make sure the system start up graphical target
```
systemctl set-default graphical.target
```
Setup to autologin as the dedicated user. Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf. Will also need to make sure Wayland is not running.
```
[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=True
AutomaticLogin=kioskuser
WaylandEnable=false
```
Setup the user’s session to run com.redhat.Kiosk. Edit /var/lib/AccountService/users/kioskuser.
```
[User]
Session=com.redhat.Kiosk
SystemAccount=false
```
Suppress initial setup dialog box. Edit /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-initial-setup-first-login.desktop.
```
line: "X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false"
```
Create an infinite loop script to run the kiosk app by creating file ~kioskuser/.local/bin/redhat-kiosk. In this example, bring up the world clock on firefox.
```
#!/bin/sh
while true; do
    firefox -kiosk https://time.gov
done
```
Make sure the script is executable
```
chmod +x ~kioskuser/.local/bin/redhat-kiosk
```