FreeBSD desktop AMIs arrive on Amazon EC2 with KDE and RDP

FreeBSD can now be run as a cloud desktop. The desktop AMIs, which boot the open-source operating system with a graphical desktop, were published on September 24 by Colin Percival, who leads release engineering for the project's Amazon EC2 platform.

"Most people think of FreeBSD as being a server OS which is used only via the command line, but as anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest, it works just fine with a GUI too," Percival wrote.

What the desktop AMIs contain

The images ship with KDE plus Chromium and LibreOffice pre-installed, a combination Percival rates as a useful starting point; further software can be added with pkg. Both UFS-root and ZFS-root versions are published, and there is no arm64 build yet because no Chromium package exists for that architecture.

His instructions use an m7i-flex.large instance, built on fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and look up the current image through an AWS SSM parameter that points at FreeBSD 15.1-STABLE.

Remote desktop instead of a terminal

Rather than SSH, the AMIs are reached over the Remote Desktop Protocol, the same mechanism used for Windows virtual machines, and they can be booted under the AWS Free Tier. Percival says he designed them to behave as much like Windows images as possible, except that, running FreeBSD, they carry no operating system licence fee.

The steps mirror a Windows RDP deployment: open TCP port 3389 to your address in a security group, import an RSA key pair in PEM format, launch the instance, then fetch the ec2-user password through the EC2 GetPasswordData API. Clients should verify the host certificate fingerprint; Unix tools want SHA256, Windows utilities the older SHA1.

Caveats and availability

The AWS Console does not know these AMIs support RDP: its "Launch an instance" wizard suggests opening TCP port 22 instead of 3389, and the Connect wizard shows SSH instructions rather than the RDP ones it shows for Windows. Percival has asked Amazon for a way to mark AMIs as RDP-enabled; he expects the images in FreeBSD 15.2-RELEASE, due in December.

Like every AMI published by the FreeBSD Project, they are free, with users paying only for EC2 infrastructure. They are available in all commercial AWS regions except Middle East (Bahrain) and Middle East (UAE), which the project cites as having ongoing availability issues.

Why it matters

FreeBSD includes no GUI, so desktop users normally install one themselves, and the AMIs remove that first hurdle: a newcomer can start a session in the cloud with no hardware to prepare and no licence fee. Percival closes his post with an invitation: "If you've been thinking of trying out FreeBSD, this is your cue. Go launch an instance!"