Been playing around with amazon ec2, so far I've been able to get ubuntu-desktop working (once) although it was a random set of hacks from blogs 
ive not been able to reproduce what made it work

my setup
windows box w/- putty, NX-Nomachine, 
amazon:ubuntu 10.04 lucid ami
when i launch NX i can see the nicely rendered terminal window inside the desktop viewer, on a plain black background. previously I had tried
 sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop
but im unclear as to what steps are needed to view my new desktop within my image.
when i try start x - i get a user not authorized to start x-server..aborting
i've also noticed errors like 'xf860penconsole cannot open dev/tty0 [no such file or directory] ' and 
'
any thoughts about what this might be ?