Installing ThinLinc on Amazon EC2

In this example, we are using RHEL7 EC2-server and ThinLinc 4.11.0.

1. Download the ThinLinc server locally.

2. Find the public hostname of your EC2 server, it can for example look like this:

ec2-01-234-567-890.us-west-2.compute.amazon.com

3. Find the username of the default user on your EC2 server, it’s usually:

ec2-user

4. Download and locate your private key file which you use to authenticate with your EC2 server, it usually ends with “.pem”. Remember to give the .pem file the correct permissions:

$ chmod 400 <private_key>.pem

5. Copy the ThinLinc server .zip to your EC2 server (use the hostname fromstep 2, the private key from step 4 and the username from step 3):

$ scp -i <private_key>.pem tl-4.11.0-server.zip user@hostname:~/

6. SSH to your EC2 server:

$ ssh -i <private_key>.pem user@hostname

7. Once connected to your EC2 server, install a desktop environment of your choice, in this example we install kde (See NOTE at bottom):

$ sudo yum groupinstall kde

8. Install the ThinLinc server and follow the instructions:

$ sudo yum install unzip
$ unzip tl.4.11.0-server.zip
$ sudo tl-4.11.0-server/install-server

9. Configure your ThinLinc server to be reachable from computers outside of the EC2 firewalls, make sure to use the public hostname from step 2:

$ sudo /opt/thinlinc/bin/tl-config /vsmagent/agent_hostname=hostname
$ sudo service vsmagent restart

10. Install the ThinLinc client locally.

11. Configure your ThinLinc client to connect using Public Key authentication.

A) From ThinLinc client start screen go to Advance and Options.

B) Go to Security and change your Authentications method from Password to Public key.

12. Connect to your EC2 server using ThinLinc Client.

NOTE: For example, if you want xfce instead of kde:

$ curl https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm -o epel.rpm
$ sudo yum install epel.rpm
$ sudo yum groupinstall xfce

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