Installing & remotely accessing desktop environment in RHEL7.

1) You will need to configure a yum repository. In my case I mounted the ISO locally and created the repo.

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel.repo and paste the following content
[dvd]
baseurl=file:///mnt
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release

2) Use the yum groupinstall feature.

yum groupinstall "Server with GUI"


In my case this installed around 800+ RPMs and desktop environment was installed.

3) Now if you can install tiger-vnc 

yum install tigervnc-server
vncserver :1

The default file /root/.vnc/xstartup wasn't good for me. I could login to VNC, but it won't show me anything. So I replaced the contents of /root/.vnc/xstartup with following

#!/bin/sh

[ -r /etc/sysconfig/i18n ] && . /etc/sysconfig/i18n
export LANG
export SYSFONT
vncconfig -iconic &
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
OS=`uname -s`
if [ $OS = 'Linux' ]; then
  case "$WINDOWMANAGER" in
    *gnome*)
      if [ -e /etc/SuSE-release ]; then
        PATH=$PATH:/opt/gnome/bin
        export PATH
      fi
      ;;
  esac
fi
if [ -x /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ]; then
  exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
fi
if [ -f /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ]; then
  exec sh /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
fi
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
twm &
~