How to get Debian GUI Linux on GCP (Google Cloud Platform)

This section describe how to launch and connect to Debian GUI Linux on GCP platform.

Note : This offer is available on X86 and ARM64 Architecture. Select the solution as per your requirement and follow the below steps to provision and connect to it.

1. Open Debian GUI Linux marketplace listing on GCP Marketplace.

Click here for ARM64 based Debian GUI Linux

2. Click Launch.

• It will take you to the agreement page. On this page, you can change the project from the project selector on top navigator bar as shown in the below screenshot.
• Accept the Terms and agreements by ticking the checkbox and clicking on the AGREE button.
• It will show you the successfully agreed popup page. Click on Deploy.

• On deployment page, give a name to your deployment.

• In Deployment Service Account section, click on Existing radio button and Choose a service account from the Select a Service Account dropdown.

• If you don't see any service account in dropdown, then change the radio button to New Account and create the new service account here.
• If after selecting New Account option, you get below permission error message then please reach out to your GCP admin to create service account by following Step by step guide to create GCP Service Account and then refresh this deployment page once the service account is created, it should be available in the dropdown.

You are missing resourcemanager.projects.setIamPolicy permission, which is needed to set the required roles on the created Service Account

• Select a zone where you want to launch the VM(such as us-east1-)
• Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory. (This defaults to 1 vCPUs and 3.75 GB ram.)
• Optionally change the boot disk type and size. (This defaults to “Standard Persistent Disk” and 15 GB respectively)
• Optionally change the network name and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh) and 3389 (for RDP) exposed.
• Click Deploy when you are done. Desktop Linux VM will begin deploying.

3. A summary page displays when the compute engine is successfully deployed. Click on the Instance link to go to the instance page .

4. On the instance page, click on the “SSH” button, select “Open in browser window”.

5. This will open SSH window in a browser.
6. Run below commands to create “debian” user and add it to sudo group.

sudo adduser debian

sudo adduser debian sudo

7. Now the debian user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP protocol or linux machine using Remmina.

8. To connect using RDP via Windows Machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below

9. Then From you local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”

10. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, copy the external ip and click connect

11. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “debian” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

12. Now you are connected to the out of box Debian GUI Linux environment via Windows Machine.

13. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

Note: : If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, first Install Remmina as per your linux distribution.

14. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter

15. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide debian as username and password set above step to authenticate. Click OK

16. Now you are connected to out of box Debian GUI Linux environment via Linux machine.

17. Follow below steps to add new user
18. Open terminal and type below command and follow the instruction -

sudo adduser username

19. Now add newly created user to the sudo group by running below command-

sudo adduser username sudo

20. Once new user setup is completed, Open Remote Desktop and login via new user and select “use default config” panel option.

21. Now you are connected to out of box Debian GUI Linux environment with new user