We like to use the best operating for the job and we use a mixture of Windows, Mac and Linux.  Our typical Linux installation is a virtualized system and it does not include a desktop; we do all of the administration from the command line.

The other day, we were asked to propose a solution which installs on Linux but the installation must be performed from a Linux desktop.  No problem, we installed the desktop package with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

But since our Linux installations are virtualized, we needed a way of connecting to the newly installed desktop.

The following command installs xrdp which allows us to use an RDP client from Windows or Mac to connect to our desktop.

sudo apt-get install xrdp

With the above two packages installed, we were able to connect to our virtualized Linux machine using a standard RDP client and install our proposed solution.