[SOLVED] Recommendation for Kiosk-Mode aka Proxmox with Host-Display usage

[mfreudenberg]

Hi,

I'd like to setup a small kiosk-Laptop, that runs a small application in a web browser. I first thought, that i could dedicate a seperate Laptop for that purpose, but i thought, why not also use this Laptop also as a proxmox-Server? As i would like to increase the number of proxmox-hosts and maybe in future create a cluster, i could hit two birds with one stone.

Afaik i have two options:

Option 1: Installing proxmox bare-metal. Installing a VM and somehow forward the VM's Display to the hosts Display
- Is that possible?
- Is this basically a sort of an IOMMU use case, which would require IOMMU to be supported by the hardware (obviously)

Option 2: Installing a debian-based distro and installing proxmox on top
- Can you recommend that?
- Are there any drawbacks with this solution?

Thanks in advance

 

[Dunuin]

Option 1: Installing proxmox bare-metal. Installing a VM and somehow forward the VM's Display to the hosts Display
- Is that possible?

Only with PCI passthrough of the GPU. Might be hard with a laptop where you can`t install additional GPUs.

- Is this basically a sort of an IOMMU use case, which would require IOMMU to be supported by the hardware (obviously)

Yes.

Option 2: Installing a debian-based distro and installing proxmox on top
- Can you recommend that?

Yes you can install a Debian with dsktop environment with PVE packages on top or install PVE from the PVE iso and then add a desktop environment. But keep in mind that packages like network-manager that comes with a desktop environment like gnome can screw up yur network config. See:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Developer_Workstations_with_Proxmox_VE_and_X11

- Are there any drawbacks with this solution?

You can only access that VM using a remote protocol like SPICE/RDP/VNC. Won't feel as snappy as a bare metal installation or PCI passthrough of a GPU+USBcontroller+soundcard and quality won't be that great because of compression artifacts and there will be additional latency.

 

[mfreudenberg]

I just found a wiki entry, that explains how you can install a minimal XFCE on top of an existing proxmox.
It's basically three packages, that you need to install and (re)start lightdm. Afterwards you can log in. Optionally, you may want to create a non-root user.
I also installed some laptop specific packages like tlp and xfce power management to be able to switch off the laptop's display. I needed TLP so that an attached USB-barcode reader does not go to sleep mode.

Here is the wiki-link:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Developer_Workstations_with_Proxmox_VE_and_X11