STAGE 2: Radxa Zero 2 Pro with minimal Armbian image (2/4) - Second add a light-weight GUI

Adding xfce (light-weight) desktop GUI to your super speedy minimalist Armbian os running on the mighty Radxa Zero 2 Pro

9/12/20242 min read

Ok so you installed the minimalist Armbian OS to max out the power you can get from your Radxa Zero 2 Pro ... Wifi added ...

BUT

No desktop, no ethernet, what about headless ?

Lets add a light-weight desktop GUI to make things a little more user friendly. Note that you must first have set-up wifi.

1) Boot the device with keyboard, mouse and screen attached and get to the bash prompt

2) Select a desktop

There are a lot of options for a machine as powerful as the Radxa Zero 2 Pro but our pick of the lightweight X11-based ones where we guard as much system resource for development but still have some helpul features and a minimalist look and feel is ... Xfce. Sure you can look at LXGt or LXDE but we feel they are too minimal on features and require too much customisation. Xfce may be a bit more resource greedy (not much) but it just easier to get into. Personally we would avoid KDE.

Whatever desktop GUI you pick AVOID anything Wayland-based at all costs. It may be more modern, but the support you can find online for it is sketchy leaving you alone to figure out how to work with it.

3) Lets get a GUI going ..

Boot-up
sudo apt install xfce4
sudo apt install xfce4-goodies
sudo apt install xorg
sudo apt install lightdm
sudo systemctl enable lightdm

Reboot and you shoul dbe presented with a nice simple login screen for your normal username and password and be sent into the graphical world of Xfce.

It's very easy to customise with already useful tools in place and pointers. You will notice key applications (like a web browser and email client are not present but they are easy to add - we also added our favourite code editor Geany). Firefox was automatically linked to the generic web-broswer link - probably the rest will be too.

sudo apt install firefox-esr
sudo apt install thunderbird
sudo apt install geany

Enjoy playing with the GUI. We found it to be massively customisable.

At this point systems resources are still incredibly available to you. With the GUI running we were seeing 10% RAM usage (10% of 4GB), 9% of the EMMC (9% of 16GB) used and only 2% CPU load.

In the next feature we will be adding ethernet support with the ultimate goal of running headless.