Prerequisites

• A fresh Webdock cloud Ubuntu instance (18.04 or later)
• You have shell access to your VPS.

Installing XFCE desktop environment

First update the packages and repositories on your Webdock server.

# sudo apt update -y

Install the XFCE desktop environment on your Webdock server.

# sudo apt install xfce4

On Ubuntu 20.04, while installing the desktop environment, it will ask for the default display manager.

Select the default display manager from the list and select the OK button to continue.

Installing XRDP server

Tip: You may want to try NoMachine instead which is an XRDP alternative which offers superior performance and features.

Now install the xrdp server to listen for an RDP connection on your Webdock server.

# sudo apt install xrdp

Start and enable the xrdp service.

# sudo systemctl enable xrdp.service
# sudo systemctl start xrdp.service

Now, we need to add xrdp to ssl-cert user group.  XRDP uses an ssl certificate and we need to make it readable to our user.

$ sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert

NOTE: XRDP server runs on port 3389 so in case of Webdock perfect server stack, you need to allow traffic from port 3389 to connect to your Desktop Environment.

# sudo ufw allow 3389

Connect to the server over RDP

In order to connect to the Webdock server, first create a shell user from the Webdock dashboard. Click on ‘more’ option from the top right corner.

Select the ‘Shell Users’.

Enter the username and password for the new shell user and click on Add User’.

Use this shell username and password to connect to the Webdock server over RDP.

To learn more about connecting to the Webdock server over RDP from Windows, Linux or Mac, visit this guide

Test XFCE on Webdock

After connecting to the Webdock server over RDP, open the Terminal emulator on the Webdock server and check the current desktop session using the following command.

# env | grep CURRENT_DESKTOP

Output:

XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=XFCE

Conclusion

This article explains the step by step procedure to install the XFCE desktop environment on your Webdock server. XFCE is a lightweight and fast desktop environment suitable for servers with lower resources. Visit the official site of XFCE to learn more about it.