Ok ive tried for 2-3 hours.  All i want is a desktop with either chrome or fire fox installed, to surf/download from a RDP.  I really dont want to try my hand at making an ubuntu o Mint kvm, and loose a gig of ram in the process.  Is there a way to do this?  Ive been trying to use the command line to get chrome onto some of the stock 1 app dockers.

 

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*; sudo apt-get -f install

 

but then i get dependency problems.

 

 

And limetech had this nice little video showing a dockerized ubuntu with firefox installed, but i think that got yanked 4 months ago.

It's doable, I've installed Sparklyballs' Calibre Desktop app and need a web browser.  So

 

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

 

Not strictly speaking what you were asking, but it answers the question, yes it's possible.

were do you wget from?

 

Just running that line doesnt pull anything and i just get "unable to locate package". 

You can't just use any docker as most of them don't have a desktop installed in them.  I specifically used the Calibre Desktop one as an illustration because it already has a MATE GUI. 

 

A docker container is a bit like an empty glass that you mix your own cocktail in from scratch.

 

To get a browser installed in that environment there are a lot of ingredients before you get to the cocktail umbrella that would be the browser and it's not something I know how to do.

 

Using one of the RDP apps at least gives you a ready made cocktail to "finish off" but it's not really how you're meant to do things in the docker environment.

 

These changes will also be lost if the author pushes an update and you update the container.

 

A minimal VM would definitely be my advice here.

 

Whether you're running a desktop with browser in docker or a VM seems irrelevant, what makes you think it's going to use less resources if you run it as a docker?

I Assumed a docker would not eat 512-1gig of ram like a VM, and that cpu cycles would be almost nill for both if it was not being used.

 

I tried using apt-get in one of sparkly's many mate desktops, but i thought i needed a step before that to get the files on the system since it doesnt have a install package manager.

I seem to remember Sparklyballs' mentioning somewhere that the RDP docker containers are resource heavy..

 

If it were me I'd install one of the minimal Linux desktop distros as a VM.

 

I love the Calibre Desktop container and use it a lot, but today my docker.img got borked so I had to redownload all my containers, now I have to setup the Calibre one with my plugins and browser all over again. 

 

In fact, I'm almost convincing myself here to just run a VM.

I do have a docker you can use: https://hub.docker.com/r/aptalca/docker-rdp-dev/~/dockerfile/

 

You can find it in the Community Applications under the name Dockergui-Dev

 

It opens a terminal window, and from there you can install and run whatever you want (Firefox works, but chrome for some reason didn't work at first try)

 

user is nobody and the password is PASSWD

 

EDIT: Updated the docker to a more recent xrdp version and now chromium seems to work as well

FWIW, I just installed a Windows XP VM on a 15GB hard drive image, with 512KB of Ram and 1 core and installed firefox and it was a very pleasant user experience with a VNC window. I only ended up using 3GB of the 15GB so you could go with less if you are worried about space.