In the procedure that follows, you will perform the following tasks:

• Create an Administrators group and give the group permission to access all of your AWS account's resources.
• Create a user for yourself and add that user to the Administrators group.
• Create a password for your user so you can sign in to the AWS Management Console.

You will grant the Administrators group permission to access all your available AWS account resources. Available resources are any AWS products you use, or that you are signed up for. Users in the Administrators group can also access your AWS account information, except for your AWS account's security credentials.

Lab: Creating IAM Admin User and Group

1. Use your AWS account email address and password to sign in as the AWS account root user to the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.
2. Enable access to billing data for the IAM admin user that you will create.

1. On the navigation bar, choose your account name, and then choose My Account.

2. Next to IAM User and Role Access to Billing Information, choose Edit.
3. Select the check box to Activate IAM Access and choose Update.
4. On the navigation bar, choose Services and then IAM to return to the IAM dashboard.

3. In the navigation pane, choose Users and then choose Add user.
4. For User name, type Administrator.
5. Select the check box next to AWS Management Console access, select Custom password,

and then type your new password in the text box. By default, AWS forces the new user to create a new password when first signing in. You can optionally clear the check box next to User must create a new password at next sign-in to allow the new user to reset their password after they sign in.

6. Choose Next: Permissions.
7. On the Set permissions page, choose Add user to group.
8. Choose Create group.
9. In the Create group dialog box, for Group name type Administrators.
10. Choose Filter policies, and then choose AWS managed - job function to filter the table contents.
11. In the policy list, select the check box for AdministratorAccess. Then choose Create group.
12. Back in the list of groups, select the check box for your new group. Choose Refresh if necessary, to see the group in the list.
13. Choose Next: Tags.
14. (Optional) Add metadata to the user by attaching tags as key-value pairs.
15. Choose Next: Review to see the list of group memberships to be added to the new user.

When you are ready to proceed, choose Create user.

Graphical Interface on your EC2 running Ubuntu

Amazon EC2 Linux servers do not come with GUI, all the operations have to be done using ssh client like putty. So, if you wish to have a GUI for your EC2 Linux instances, you need to install one. Once you installed the GUI Desktop on your server, you can access it via remote desktop client like Windows Remote Connections. 

There are several Desktops for Linux such as:

• KDE
• GNOME
• LXDE

Here we will install LXDE.

Why LXDE?

1. Specially designed for cloud-based servers.
2. Lightweight GUI for Linux
3. Better interface
4. Multi-language support
5. Supports standard keyboard shortcuts
6. Fast performance

Prerequisites

1. A running Ubuntu ec2 instance.
2. Security group inbound traffic configured for ssh and RDP access (22 and 3389)

Getting Started

Step 1: Connect to the server using ssh client putty. How To Connect Ubuntu Server Using Putty?

Step 2: Make sure that RDP port is enabled on the Ubuntu instance in which you are going to install lxde. Update the server and install lxde using the following commands.

$ sudo apt-get update -y  

$ sudo apt-get install lxde -y

Step 3:  Install xrdp to establish a remote desktop connection since you can’t have a GUI using putty. Use the following command to install xrdp

$ sudo apt-get install xrdp -y

$ sudo passwd ubuntu

Step 4: Set a password for the default user  “ubuntu”, as remote desktop connection requires username and password.

Note: You can set up your own user and password for remote desktop

Step 5: Start the windows remote desktop client and enter the public DNS or the public IP of your server instance and hit connect.

Step 6: Enter the username and password of the server instance that we created in step 5 and hit ok. Make sure RDP 3389 is enabled in your security group.

Note that the default theme is black. You can change it as follows:

To change the default GTK2 theme on the LXDE desktop, you’ll need to open the LXAppearance. The fastest way to launch this app is by opening it with the launcher. Press ALT + F2, type “lxappearance” and press the enter key.

Inside LXAppearance, the GTK2 theme browser is the default page. Scroll through the list, and select a theme that suits you. After selecting a theme, click “apply”.

Install OpenOffice

Now that we have the Desktop installed, we can install an office suite. Follow the following steps to install Open office, an opensource Office suite.

Step 1: We will install this in the /opt directory

sudo su -

cd /opt

Step 2: Download the package. Copy and paste the following on your Linux shell

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/4.1.7/binaries/en-US/Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.7_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz/download

Step 3: extract the tar file and move into the correct folder and install OpenOffice using dpkg

tar -xvf download

cd en-US/DEBS

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

cd desktop-integration

dpkg -i *.deb

At this point, you have Openoffice installed. The following applications were installed:

• Writer a word processor you can use for anything from writing a quick letter to producing an entire book.
• Calc a powerful spreadsheet with all the tools you need to calculate, analyze, and present your data in numerical reports or sizzling graphics.
• Impress the fastest, most powerful way to create effective multimedia presentations.
• Draw lets you produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations.
• Base lets you manipulate databases seamlessly. Create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports, all from within Apache OpenOffice.
• Math lets you create mathematical equations with a graphic user interface or by directly typing your formulas into the equation editor.

To see the applications, go to start and click on Office applications, and you will see all the above applications. You can start using them if you like.

Part 2: (Optional)

In this part, you will install gnome to help you switch between the LXDE (you installed earlier) and Gnome. This is just to give you more Linux practice. 

Install the Gnome Session

1. Open a Terminal window
2. Install gnome-sessions

sudo apt install gnome-session

3. Enter ‘Y’ to install the required packages
4. Log out of your account

Set the Gnome 3 Vanilla Theme as Default

Before we can switch the new desktop and theme, we need to install the Vanilla Gnome theme.

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Set the Gnome theme to default to the vanilla theme.

sudo update-alternatives --config gdm3.css

3. Log out of your account

Switching Desktop Environments

With gnome-sessions installed, we can now select the desktop environment we would like to use. From the logon screen, you will see a gear Icon to the left of the Sign-In button. When clicked, a drop-down of available environments is presented.

Select the GNOME on Xorg desktop to log into your new Gnome Vanilla theme. Your selection will be saved for future logons.

Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop Selection

Create an Ubuntu VM

0. Check your laptop spec and see if it has at least 8GB of RAM. If it does, you'll probably be fine with the rest of the specs.

1. download VirtualBox

https://www.virtualbox.org/

2. Install it by double-clicking and following the steps.

3. Please use this video to create a VM and install Linux. The video has no audio, just a walkthrough

you can download mini.iso from here:

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic-updates/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/

Note: if you don't see the Linux64 version, your laptop may not be configured for virtualization. In that case, you need to enable it from the BIOS. Google and follow the instructions for your laptop model on how to enable virtualization.

Create an Ubuntu VM

0. Check your laptop spec and see if it has at least 8GB of RAM. If it does, you'll probably be fine with the rest of the specs.

1. download VirtualBox

https://www.virtualbox.org/

2. Install it by double-clicking and following the steps.

3. Please use this video to create a VM and install Linux. The video has no audio, just a walkthrough

you can download mini.iso from here:

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic-updates/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/

Note: if you don't see the Linux64 version, your laptop may not be configured for virtualization. In that case, you need to enable it from the BIOS. Google and follow the instructions for your laptop model on how to enable virtualization.