I’m collaborating with a very small team to develop business process tools for an energy risk management company. One of the developers was not as comfortable with the UNIX command-line interface and wanted to know if I could set up a GUI.

It turns out, you can. Assuming you have shell access to the instance, this is the easy way to do it. Log into your instance and load the following packages:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install vnc4server
vncserver :1

Launching VNCserver will prompt you for a password. When your VNC client of choice (I use Chicken, based on Chicken of the VNC by Jason Harris) connects, you see a terminal window in the desktop. Type the following command to start your gnome desktop:

nohup gnome-session &

This will launch the gnome desktop session manager and bring you to an UBUNTU desktop you might recognize. Most of the base configurations are exceptionally small machines. Launching a desktop is pretty taxing, launching a browser is paralyzing.

You should know there are more efficient ways to an UBUNTU windowing system. Installing the entire ubuntu-desktop will create a collection of tools that you may never use, making your storage footprint quite a bit larger. If you do not want all the desktop tools you can install only what you need.

There are also a range of remote desktop servers and clients available. I chose the Chicken fork of VNC. You might like to investigate FreeNX, or any of the other flavors of the VNC family.

Once the correct EC2 tools are installed, the proper keys are generated, in the right directories, the instance behaves like any other remote server.

I’m interested to learn what our burn rate will be for the services we’re developing. What I see so far is encouraging.