In this blog, I will be talking about installing the Gnome
desktop or GUI on a Fedora 23 server. Normally, you would not require a GUI for
a server since you can very much manage everything from the command line.
However, pays to know how to setup a GUI if needed.
So dnf can be run as a root user. So I logged in as a root user and started the install of the “Fedora Workstation” as shown in the below couple of snapshots.
I will be covering more on dnf later so will cover just the
–y flag. The –y basically says to assume all answers/prompts to be yes.
The install will first download all the files related to
Fedora Workstation and then verify it, followed by upgrade/installation.
Snapshots are as shown below in the screenshot.
Downloading the component files is as shown below.
Upgrading and installing software in progress is as shown in the below snapshot.
Once the install is complete, I will do some basic setup to
enable me to switch to GUI mode. For this I make a copy of the xinitrc file and
put the command to launch the gnome session in this file.
The gnome-session program starts the GNOME desktop
environment.
Xinitrc file is a shell script read by xinit and by front
end component startx. It is mainly used to execute desktop environments and
other programs when starting an X server.
I have made a copy the default file xinitrc and appended the
command to start the GNOME desktop in it.
Once the above changes are done, all I do is type startx on
the command prompt. This will start the GNOME desktop for me.
Since this is the first time I am doing the setup of the
desktop, it would ask me the initialization options as shown
below.
After I click the start using Fedora button, in the above
screenshot, I have a GUI access for the Fedora 23 server as shown in the below
snapshot.
P.S. The look and feel had me hooked… Its so clean and
enticing… But nothing beats the matrix black and white command line… :)
References:-
DNF command references
xinitrc
