In the previous tutorial, we saw how to prepare an Armbian lightweight system for an Orange Pi. To do this, we started from the Server version that does not have a graphical desktop. In this tutorial, we’ll see how to update a server version installed in the previous tutorial to add the graphical desktop XFCE (lightweight) also).
Equipment used
For this tutorial, I used an Orange Pi Lite (WiFi version) with an 8GB SD card but this tutorial applies to any Linux environment.
 | Orange Pi Lite or other model |
 | Power 5V/3A Or USB cable, about €2.50€ |
 | Armbian on 8Go SD Card class 10 |
Warning
In some cases (or some mini computer board), migration to a graphics environment may not work. If you still have no functional project on your SD card, the best is to directly re-install the Desktop version that suits your mini PC. Indeed, there may be problems with some GPUs It is however possible to uninstall the installed packages by executing these two commands successively:
libxfce4util-common
Then
sudo apt-get autoremove
Installing the XFCE 4.x Desktop
So we will install the XFCE desktop (official website). If you are not logged in as root, change user
su -
Then you start the installation of the XFCE desktop and the dependencies
sudo apt-get -y install xorg lightdm xfce4 tango-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme
Restart (sudo reboot) or manually start the desktop with the startxfce4 command.
After the launch you will go directly to a login window. Identify yourself as usual. You now have a graphical desktop on your Orange Pi. This is the same desktop that is used for the Desktop version of the Armbian distribution. It is simply installed in its default configuration with the minimum of pre-installed software (mail, web browser).
Useful links
- Armbian documentation: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Fine-Tuning/#how-to-upgrade-into-simple-desktop-environment
- XFCE project homepage: https://www.xfce.org/
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