Enabling Desktop Environment¶

A desktop/graphical interface can be enabled on any kind of systems (regardless of puppet role).

Full Desktop Configuration¶

A full desktop configuration with Gnome, office software and printing is enabled for the Puppet roles role::workstation and role::console or, independent of the role, in Hiera with

base::is_workstation: true

Customized Desktop Configuration¶

But desktop features can also be individually be switched on or off. For printing check out the respective guide.

The availability of the desktop is controlled with

base::enable_desktop: true

By default this will install and enable Gnome as desktop and gdm as Display Manager.

To actually bring up the desktop up at boot to the monitor, you additionally need:

base::systemd_default_target: graphical

The desktop configuration can be further refined and/or adapted by following keys:

desktop::display_manager: gdm  # available options: gdm (default), lightdm, none

# this will set the default session manager aka desktop
desktop::session_manager: gnome-xorg # available options: gnome-xorg (default on RHEL8), gnome-wayland (default on RHEL9), gnome-classic, xfce, ...

No display manager (desktop::display_manager: none) is useful for terminal server or other servers where only virtual desktops, but no real physical access is required.

Individual desktops can be enabled/disabled via:

desktop::enable_gnome: true # true (default)
desktop::enable_xfce: true # false (default)
desktop::enable_icewm: true # false (default)

The installation of office applications can be enforced with

desktop::enable_office_apps: true

Further refinements can be done as documented in the other guides in this section.

Finally here a rough overview of the desktop profile structure:

Structure desktop profile Structure desktop_profile