Install GUI Desktop in WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS in Windows 10

Harshit Yadav
3 min readSep 12, 2020

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First check if you Windows 10 Version supports WSL 2 or not checkout the link [Link]

Setup

Once you are done with installation, you can set wsl2 to be default using command:

wsl --set-default-version 2

you can check the version of the distro using command (our case ubuntu 2)

wsl -l -v

You can change the version using command if its WSL version 1

wsl --set-version <Distro> 2

Once your distro is up and running you can setup either Xfce

1 . Update the Distro installation and remove previous install of xrdp

$sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade
$sudo apt-get purge xrdp

2. Install Xfce , select lightdm or gdm3 as per your prefernce when asked

# install xfce 
sudo apt-get install -y xfce4 xfce4-goodies

3 . Install Xrdp

# install xrdp
sudo apt-get install xrdp

4 .Open the file in location and edit as shown in the image

sudo nano /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

and add comment the last 2 lines and add the following in the end

# xce4
Startxfce4

5. No run the following to set the port and other settings

$sudo cp /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini.bak
$sudo sed -i 's/3389/3390/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
$sudo sed -i 's/max_bpp=32/#max_bpp=32\nmax_bpp=128/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
$sudo sed -i 's/xserverbpp=24/#xserverbpp=24\nxserverbpp=128/g' /etc/xrdp/xrdp.iniecho xfce4-session > ~/.xsession#enable dbus
$sudo systemctl enable dbus
$sudo /etc/init.d/dbus start
$sudo /etc/init.d/xrdp start

6. Open RDP in windows and connect to localhost :3390

And if all went well it should log in with your username and password of WSL2

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Harshit Yadav
Harshit Yadav

Written by Harshit Yadav

Software Developer | Azure Solution Architect Expert | Technical Writer | harshityadav.in

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