Adding a GUI to a Server or VPS

There are several reasons why one would want a remote desktop experience, no matter for a more easier way to administer your server/vps, or to provide remote desktop access to clients, or for an office setup, or even just because you can! This is going to be a quick walk thru on how I personally set one up.

You will need to pick your DE of choice, now for me as this is a remote desktop, I like speed and lightweight. This will allow me to get the most of out the vps/server if it has a smaller memory/cpu footprint.

Because of the small footprint I decided to go with Xfce as me DE of choice. So lets get started.

Here are some other minimum requirements for Xfce:  Please note this is on top of your vps/server OS. So plan accordingly.

• 1 GB of memory 
• 30 GB of hard disk space 
• A 1 GHz processor 
• An HD graphics card and monitor 
• A broadband internet connection 
• A Pentium 4 1.6 GHz or higher processor, or any AMD64 or Intel64 processor 
• 800 x 600 display resolution, or 1024 x 768 or higher recommended 
• Support for booting from a DVD drive, USB-stick, or over a network 

Xfce is a lightweight Linux desktop environment that is fast, stable, and highly customizable. It performs well with older hardware and is rescue-friendly. It also has low CPU usage, which makes it a good choice for running many applications at once. 

So lets begin.

I decided to go with Ubuntu 22 as my base OS. So head over to your Server/VPS provider of choice and order up what you feel will fit your needs and budget. At this time, I have a spare Intel E3 1230 v3 with 32GB’s of RAM in it. So I know overkill for this example, but hey its what I have laying around so for this demo its the example. 🙂

First things we need to do is connect to your VPS/Server and start updating, tweak the firewall, install all our packages, and we are off to the races!

So connect to your box via ssh however you do; command line, terminal, console, what have you.

First thing I do is update the system.

Now this is going to run a GUI and an SSH server, so we need to install a firewall and configure it.

apt install ufw
ufw allow 22
ufw allow 3389
ufw enable

Once your firewall is setup, then update and upgrade the system.

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -y

Now just sit back and relax for 10 minutes or so while the system updates.

Now for me, you don’t have to, but I like to reboot the system, give it a fresh load after all the updates.

Now that we are back from a reboot, login and run the following to install xfce4.

apt install xfce4

This process will only install a few items, for me it took about 3 minutes to finish. Now we need to install the RDP server. Run the following command.

apt install xrdp

Now we need to make sure the startvm.sh file was created and correct.

nano /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

Mine each time looks like this, but just double check. Once checked, we need to restart the terminal server.

service xrdp restart

Now fire up your RDP client of choice and connect to your new RDP server!

Now you can start installing any of your software and creating your users, and you should be good to go!

And as you can see, it will run on a large potato. ** Keep in mind once you start installing things it will use up that memory, but you get my reference. 🙂