For many of the tools on Kali Linux, it’s easiest to run them as root, so the defacto standard has more or less become to run as root when using Kali. Google Chrome, on the other hand, would not like to be run as root (because it makes sandboxing harder when your user is all-powerful) so there have been a number of tricks to get it to run. I’m going to describe my preferred setup here. (Mostly as documentation for myself.)

Download and Install the Chrome .deb file.

I prefer the Google Chrome Beta build, but stable will work just fine too. Download the .deb file and install it:

dpkg -i google-chrome*.deb

If it’s a fresh Kali install, you’ll be missing libappindicator, but you can fix that via:

apt-get install -f

Getting a User to Run Chrome

We’ll create a dedicated user to run Chrome, this provides some user isolation and prevents Chrome from complaining.

useradd -m chrome

Setting up su

Now we’ll setup su to handle the passing of X credentials between the users. We’ll add pam_xauth to forward it, and configure root to pass credentials to the chrome user.

sed -i 's/@include common-session/session optional pam_xauth.so\n\0/' \
  /etc/pam.d/su
mkdir -p /root/.xauth
echo chrome > /root/.xauth/export

Setting up the Chrome Desktop Icon

All that’s left now is to change the Application Menu entry (aka .desktop) to use the following as the command:

su -l -c "/usr/bin/google-chrome-beta" chrome