The remote desktop is a regular RockyLinux instance equipped with X2Go. It enables you to access a graphical desktop computer running in your remote instance of choice, over a low bandwidth (or high bandwidth) connection. This means that you can connect to it via the X2Go client to enjoy a regular desktop user experience.

This is a configuration template (i.e. an Ansible Playbook) to customize your environment in the European Weather Cloud (EWC).

The template is designed to:

• Provision an instance via Terraform, with your specified Linux distribution and desired flavor (a.k.a VM plan):

  • If a terraform.tfstate state file is not found under the user-defined directory, attempts to create the instance from scratch

  OR

  • if terraform.tfstate file is found, leverages Terraform's out-of-the-box

  functionality to update the instance referenced on it

• Configure the existing or newly provisioned instance such that it:

  • Enables users to operate the remote hosts through a graphical desktop (i.e. a MATE desktop environment), over a low or high bandwidth connection.

After successful provisioning, you can take advantage of Terraform built-in functionality to safely modify or delete the instance. You'll find the definition of your instance in main.tf, and its current state in terraform.tfstate, under the user-defined tf_project_path directory.

To learn the basics about managing infrastructure with Terraform, checkout the official documentation examples.

Prerequisites

💡 Versions listed correspond to minimal prerequisites.

To successfully run this playbook, the following packages should be available in your work environment:

Usage

1. Download Ansible dependencies

💡 By default, Ansible Roles are installed under the ~/.ansible/roles directory within your working environment.

Download the correct version of the Ansible dependencies, if you haven't done so already:

ansible-galaxy role install -r requirements.yml

2. Configure and apply the template

2.1. Interactive Mode

By running the following command, you can trigger an interactive session that prompts you for the necessary user inputs, and then applies changes to your target EWC environment:

ansible-playbook remote-desktop-provisioning.yml

2.2. Non-Interactive Mode

💡 To learn more about defining variables at runtime, checkout the official Ansible documentation.

You can also run in non-interactive mode by passing the --extra-vars or -e flag, followed by a map of key-value pairs; one for each and every available input (see inputs section below). For example:

ansible-playbook \
  -e '{
        "ewc_provider": "eumetsat",
        "tf_project_path":"~/iac/x2go-server-1",
        "app_name":"x2go",
        "instance_name":"server",
        "instance_index": 1,
        "flavor_name":"eo2.medium",
        "image_name":"Rocky-9.5-20250604142417",
        "public_keypair_name":"john-claudy-publickey",
        "private_keypair_path":"~/.ssh/id_rsa",
        "private_network_name": "private",
        "security_group_name": "ssh",
        "whitelisted_ip_ranges": ""
    }' \
  remote-desktop-provisioning.yml

3. Install the local client and connect to your remote desktop

⚠️ When configuring a connection, be sure to select "MATE" (instead of "KDE" or any other options) in the Session Type drop-down list, towards the bottom of the Session tab. This is required for the local client to correctly communicate with your remote desktop.

Install the remote desktop client on Microsoft Window, Mac OS or Linux by following the links on the official X2Go installation page. Then follow the official X2Go client usage page if you do not know how to configure a new session.

For a session creation example, representative of a typical EWC environment, checkout the Remote Desktop section of this official EWC documentation page.

Inputs

Dependencies

⚠️ Only RockyLinux 8.10 and 9.5 instances are currently supported due to constrains imposed by the required ewc-ansible-role-remote-desktop Ansible Role.

💡 A VM plan with at least 4GB of RAM is recommended for successful setup and stable operation.