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

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

Click here for ARM64 based CentOS 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 20 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. CentOS 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 command to update the password for centos user

sudo passwd centos

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

8. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, copy the external ip and click connect.Accept the certificate warning.

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

10. Now you are connected to out of box CentOS GUI Linux environment via Windows Machine.

11. 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.

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

13. Click yes on certificate warning.

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

15. Now you are connected to out of box CentOS GUI Linux environment via Linux Machine.

16. Run below command to create new user

sudo adduser username

17. Once user is added, set the password of that user by running-

sudo passwd username

18. Now add newly created user to the wheel group to give the sudo access by running below command-

sudo usermod -aG wheel username

19. New user setup is completed.You can acces CentOS GUI Linux with this user.