GUI in Amazon EC2 Linux instance

You can check out the post here if you are interested in using Freenx to connect to an Amazon AMI using Fedora, CentOS, RHEL (or any other yum based distro).

I don't know if it exits. But you can usually install a VNC server on any Linux installation, including existing AMIs. And then connect using a VNC client to get remote desktop.

Or use an NX server and client.

Or even plain X protocol, but this will be very slow.

You can install GNOME on LINUX AMI's for GUI. You can also make use of NOMACHINE for this. If you are making use of Ubuntu AMI's follow steps mentioned below :

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
sudo -E apt-get update
sudo -E apt-get install -y ubuntu-desktop

This works on RHEL 6.3 64-bit: (note: # means superuser and can be replaced by sudo)

# yum groupinstall "Desktop"    
# yum install tigervnc-server xorg-x11-fonts-Type1
# vncserver 
# chkconfig vncserver on

# vi /etc/sysconfig/vncservers 

Edit the last two lines, uncommenting them, where myuser is a created user (usually ec2-user).

VNCSERVERS="2:myuser"  
VNCSERVERARGS[2]="-geometry 1280x1024"

Save changes.

Edit iptables:

# vi /etc/iptables

Add this line:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 5902 -j ACCEPT

Restart iptables:

# service iptables restart

Next, edit the xstartup file:

# vi /root/.vnc/xstartup

Make the last line be:

exec  gnome-session

To finish:

• Reboot the instance (to reset your vncserver services)
• Ensure the amazon security group allows tcp 5902 traffic
• Launch a VNC Viewer such as RealVNC's on your local computer
• Connect to public_ip:5902