Genesis Cloud is not designed for a remote desktop environment. With instances located in Iceland, most customers will see a higher than acceptable latency when connecting to a remote desktop while our Norway location provides an acceptable latency for users in the Northern and Western Europe.


If you need to use the graphical interface for a program running on your instance please consider using X11 Forwarding. See a detailed X11 forwarding guide here.


Here is a simple how-to guide for setting up X11 forwarding on your Genesis Cloud instance running a Ubuntu base OS:


1. On your instance install the X11 authentication client.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install xauth -y


2. Close your current SSH session and start a new one including the -Y Trusted X11 Forwarding option in your SSH command.

ssh -Y ubuntu@<your_ip_address>


3. On your instance install the x11-apps for testing.

sudo apt install x11-apps -y


4. On your instance run a simple x11-app to test forwarding.

xclock


If everything worked, you should see a clock window appear on your local desktop.

Done. Now you can open a graphical program on your instance and see the user interface on your local display.