Compute Engine

[Thamx]

Hey guys, honestly I had a great experience in GCC platform since from my first bite and its guaranteed that I still do. Well my question is: Is it really possible to run any of desktop environment (e.g. fxce4, KDE, mate, awesome and etc.) from my ubuntu instance? Because every time I SSH my ubuntu I simply step on GUI && also when I RDP my windows server I cannot reach the desktop as well,  so what could be the solution or advise on this matter?  

[kolban · Accepted solution]

Howdy and welcome to the community.  The recipe I use to reach a desktop environment in a Compute Engine is to use Chrome Remote Desktop.  Using this technique I can install a demon on the Linux environment in the Compute Engine and then run a Chrome browser on my desktop.  From there, I can login to my Compute Engine and get to see a full GUI/desktop environment.  I have found performance to be perfect from my home (I use a 100MBps ISP over cable).  If I switch it to full screen mode, I can't tell that it is running in Chrome Remote Desktop.

Setup was "ok" ... and well documented ... there a few steps but they worked as advertized.

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/chrome-desktop-remote-on-compute-engine

[king_cartman]

Hi,

Another approach, if you don't want to expose your compute instances via with public IPs is to use IAP Desktop for Windows GUI access, via the IAP tunnel.  This also allows secure SSH via IAP too (I use this in conjunction with OSLogin).

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/iap-desktop

For GUI Linux access, I installed xRDP on the backend Linux instance, and then used the an IAP tunnel over port 3389 to connect to the linux GUI.  I've also done this using VNC too.

Not used Chrome Desktop TBH - need to try this out.

[rklahn42]

This is a little old school, but you may want to look into VNC.

But, I gotta say, after a casual look, Chrome Remote Desktop looks very nice. I would try VNC only if you can't get Chrome Remote Desktop running.