Adding GUI functionality to a RHEL system

May 18, 2015July 28, 2019 Ed Goad

I find myself building several RedHat VMs, so many in fact that I have a standard build configuration and kickstart script to customize it exactly as needed. However, occasionally the standard isn’t what is needed, so some customization is needed. One of the common customizations needed is to change the basic RHEL VM into a desktop with a GUI and VNC.

To make this happen, there are a couple of steps. The first step is to install the desktop/GUI features. To accomplish this, we use YUM with the GroupInstall option and configure the system to boot to the desktop
yum groupinstall “Desktop” “Desktop Platform” “X Window System” “Internet Browser” “Graphical Administration Tools” “Fonts”
vi /etc/inittab
change initdefault from 3 to 5

Next step is to install and configure VNC for the root user
yum install tigervnc-server
vncpasswd
enter the VNC password for root

Lastly, is to configure VNC to run for root automatically
vi /etc/sysconfig/vncservers
add VNCSERVERS=”0:root”
chkconfig –level 5 vncserver on
reboot