Setting up GUI on DigitalOcean Ubuntu OS

DigitalOcean offers affordable VPS for teams to collaborate anywhere in the world. It’s very easy to set up Linux servers on the platform.

I will document down the process to add a GUI according to this link

1. SSH into VPS

   ssh root@<ip address>
   

2. Install Xfce and TightVNC

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt install xfce4 xfce4-goodies tightvncserver
   

3. Initial configurations VNCserver by setting passwords

   vncserver
   

4. Default port for VNCserver is 5901. In order to reconfigure VNCserver, we need to kill instance of VNCserver first. :1 represents port 5900+1

   vncserver -kill :1
   

5. Backup config file

   mv ~/.vnc/xstartup ~/.vnc/xstartup.bak
   

6. Modify config file. Tell VNCserver to read from resources files and start

   #!/bin/bash
   xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
   startxfce4 &
   

7. Grant executable privileges

   sudo chmod +x ~/.vnc/xstartup
   

8. Restart VNC server

   vncserver
   

9. Forward to localhost of VNC client on local machine

   ssh -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 -N -f -l username server_ip_address
   

10. Login using credentials
11. Viola!

In case port is binded, run the following to check the pid and kill the process

lsof  -i :<port number>
kill -9 <PID>

That’s all.