Installing Ubuntu Server with LXDE and XRDP

It might be useful to install a lightweight desktop environment for Ubuntu Server (20.04 LTS). Especially when combined with Remote Dekstop Protocol support using XRDP.

There are some tricky parts involved in setting this up correctly, due to gnome being present by default. After installing a display manager, gnome would be visible instead of LXDE. This article describes a working installation procedure.

The first step is to install LXDE.

sudo apt-get install lxde

During the installation LXDE will prompt the user to define the display manager to use. There are two choices presented in here: "gdm3" and "lightdm". Choose "lightdm" in this case.

The next step is to remove GDM3 and GNOME from the system.

sudo apt-get purge gdm3 gnome-shell

The next step is to create or edit the LightDM configuration.

sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

It should contain the following data.

[SeatDefaults]
user-session=LXDE

The next (optional) step is to install XRDP.

sudo apt-get install xrdp

After rebooting the LXDE session should start after logging in.