Navigate to our listing page on the AWS Marketplace and click 'Continue to Subscribe':

Ubuntu 18.04: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-lqc7k3hreax6w
Ubuntu 20.04: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-qwce5ssos754y
Ubuntu 22.04: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-e4dtm6b2qku7q
Ubuntu 24.04: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-mbjgiwr4ojlac

On the subsequent page, review and accept our terms by selecting 'Accept Terms'.

Once the subscription process is complete, select 'Continue to Configuration'.

Choose the region where you wish to deploy the virtual machine, then click 'Continue to Launch'.

On the final page, select the instance type you wish to use (the recommended instance type is pre-selected) and review the other launch options. Then, click 'Launch'.

After launching, you can view your instance in the EC2 Management Console.

Open 'Remote Desktop Connection' and connect using the public IP address of your virtual machine.

Important: Expand "More Options" and select "Allow me to save credentials" to ensure the Remote Desktop Connection prompts you for a password before connecting.

When prompted, enter 'ubuntu' as the username and the instance ID of your virtual machine as the password (please refer to the previous steps).

If you see the screen below, the login attempt has failed, usually due to an incorrect password. You can re-enter the password on this screen, but please note that the keyboard layout on this login page is set to English. Special characters may appear differently because of your physical keyboard's layout. Since the password is the instance ID of your EC2 instance, keep in mind that the hyphen ("-") in the instance ID (e.g., "i-0abc...") may be in a different location on an English keyboard - it’s usually next to the "0" (zero) key on the right. We recommend setting the password directly in the RDP client (see the "Connect to GUI" section).

Go to the EC2 Management Console and select the virtual machine to obtain its Public IPv4 address.

Open a Command Prompt / Terminal window and navigate to the directory where your created .pem key file is located. You can connect to your VM with the user 'ubuntu' by executing the following command:

ssh -i <name-of-key-file.pem> ubuntu@<public-ip>

Download and install WinSCP or any other SCP client of your choice.

Choose 'SFTP' as the file protocol and enter the public IP address of your instance, along with the username you specified when launching the virtual machine.

Click on 'Advanced'.

In the left-side menu, select 'Authentication'. Under Authentication parameters, select the key file you created when you launched the virtual machine. When prompted, convert the .pem key file to PuTTY format.

Close the Authentication window by clicking on 'OK', and connect to the virtual machine by clicking on 'Login'.

The script that launches the GUI on every reboot is centrally located at /home/start-gui.sh. You can configure it with:

nano /home/start-gui.sh

The script is executed by a cron job as the root user. You can modify the cron job with:

sudo crontab -e

Change Password for the GUI Session:

To change the password for the GUI session, edit the start-gui.sh file and modify the password variable as desired. Ensure that your new password is at least 8 characters long. Passwords with fewer than 8 characters will fail. Then, reboot the instance. Please note that the password for the GUI session is different from the password for the Linux user.

Use Another User for the GUI Session:

To use a different user for the GUI session, create a new user with:

sudo adduser guiuser

Then, add the user to the sudo group with:

sudo usermod -aG sudo guiuser

Next, edit the start-gui.sh file, change the username variable, and reboot the instance.