How To Install Xubuntu Desktop On Vultr Servers With Ubuntu 15.10

Xubuntu is XFCE + Ubuntu !

XFCE is a light-weight GUI/Desktop for Ubuntu.

Vultr Servers need additional dependencies which are, by default, not installed and therefore, the GUI would not work just by installing XFCE4 Package. However, the same can be accomplished by following the below mentioned steps:

Pre-Requisites :

• Server with Ubuntu 15.10 installed.
• Login with sudo rights / root login.

Step 1 :

Update the current repositories:

 sudo apt-get update

Step 2 :

Install Xubuntu Desktop :

 sudo apt-get install xubuntu-core^

If you want to make the server boot to command line by default, then follow the next steps : (Optional but recommended )

Step 3:

Install nano. (Nano is a text editor for CLI. You can use any other CLI text editor like vi as well)

 apt-get install nano

Step 4 :

I have used nano, but you can open /etc/default/grub in any text editor of your choice.

 sudo nano /etc/default/grub

a. Look for a line that starts with GRUBCMDLINELINUX_DEFAULT, and comment out that line by pre-pending** #** sign.

b. Change GRUBCMDLINELINUX=”” to:
GRUBCMDLINELINUX=”text”

c. Next, uncomment (by removing “#” sign) the line that says “#GRUB_TERMINAL=console”. This line should not look like :
GRUB_TERMINAL=console

d. run update-grub command to update config file in /boot based on these changes.

sudo update-grub 

e. update systemd to make it boot to CLI

sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target 

Step 5:

Reboot the system