Installing Proxmox VE followed by Xfce desktop

In my comparison of ways to install a Proxmox workstation, I stated that one way is to install Proxmox, and then install the Xfce desktop environment, followed by theming Xfce to look like Mint. Given that this is the recommended method in the Proxmox docs, I decided to give it a try.

First, I installed Proxmox the usual way. Nothing special here.

According to the Proxmox docs, the next step is to install X Windows by installing Xfce, a greeter (lightdm), and Chromium. However, I decided to make a slight change, since I wanted to easily install Xfce by using the task-xfce-desktop metapackage.

So, I instead added the non-free Debian repo first. This step is found in a later part of the Proxmox docs. I changed buster to bullseye since Proxmox is now running on Debian 11 instead of 10.

cat <<EOF >>/etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
 

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
EOF

 

Then, I went back and followed the docs, using task-xfce-desktop instead of xfce4.

apt update

apt upgrade

apt install task-xfce-desktop lightdm chromium

Next was to add a normal user so that I don't have to run things as root.

adduser user

(replace user with the user name you want)

I am doing this on a HP Z240 SFF desktop, which has an Intel E3-1245v5 processor (which has integrated graphics) as well as a Nvidia Quadro P600 discrete GPU. I plan to use this system to play around with dynamic VFIO binding and unbinding. Anyway, I next installed the Nvidia proprietary drivers from Debian repo (which, as of now, is version 470... way way way older than the version 525 I have on other systems).

First, the open-source nouveau driver needs to be blacklisted.

echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Then, the actual driver installation, which requires kernel headers.

apt install pve-headers
apt-get update
apt-get install nvidia-driver

I then rebooted the system, and was greeted by a GUI login screen, which allowed me to log in as a normal user into the Xfce desktop environment.

I followed my own guide to theme Xfce to look like Mint. This required the installation of Mint packages. First, I needed to add the official Mint repo by creating this file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list with the following contents.

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com elsie main upstream import backport 

This allowed me to install the following packages.

apt install mint-x-icons mint-y-icons mint-y-icons-legacy mint-themes mint-themes-legacy mint-artwork

 

Running neofetch got me this.

Note: Similar to installing Proxmox on top of LMDE 5, I had an error where Proxmox did not recognise the version codename "Elsie" (which is LMDE 5). It caused the error message "unknown Debian code name 'elsie' (500)" and so I had to edit /usr/lib/os-release and change

VERSION_CODENAME=elsie

to

VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye

 

This felt really smooth, but I guess that is the advantage of following the official Proxmox docs. Next would be dynamic VFIO binding and unbinding!