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X-server Remote Desktop Protocol (Xrdp)

With Xrdp you can remotely log in on a virtual machine, giving you a full virtual desktop. Moreover, you can close the RDP window and pick up the session later, allowing you to continue to work on a graphical desktop while switching off your own local computer.

First, you need to set up your Linux VM, using the following steps.

Ubuntu 18

Simplified procedure:

  • Create a VM out of our Ubuntu 18 Desktop App. Then, log in via SSH into that VM:

Note:

You will have to type in the user's password (by default, the same as the user name). Then type in a new password, repeat that when asked, and you are in a terminal on the remote VM.

ssh [email protected]...
  • We will install a few packages now:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y xorgxrdp xrdp xfce4 tango-icon-theme
  • Let's set the default manager:
sudo sed -i.bak '/fi/a #xrdp multiple users configuration \n xfce-session \n' /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh
  • Finally, let's open the firewall:
sudo ufw allow 3389/tcp
  • To make sure there are no astray sessions which may interfere, let's reboot our Ubuntu now:
sudo reboot now

After these steps, you should now be able to use your Remote Desktop client from your laptop to connect to the graphical environment. If, after logging in through the Remote Desktop client you are asked to choose a session type, the default "Xorg" should be fine.

Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04

The default Unity desktop does not support remote sessions as well as other desktop environments do. To create a virtual machine with a GUI, create a plain server VM and install the desktop environment of your choice, for example KDE or Xfce (which is used in the example below). This following example works under Ubuntu 14.04 server.

  • Become root:
sudo su -
  • Configure firewall to allow RDP and SSH to connect to your machine and enable the firewall
  ufw allow 3389
  ufw allow ssh
  ufw enable
  • Create a normal user account add this user to the super users. (replace maarten by your own login name)
  USERNAME=maarten
  adduser $USERNAME
  adduser $USERNAME sudo
  sudo usermod -aG sudo,adm $USERNAME
  • Update software repository and install necessary software
  sudo apt-get install xrdp xubuntu-desktop tightvncserver
  apt-get update
  • login to a normal user account
  su $USERNAME
  • Add settings to use right desktop environment
  echo xfce4-session >~/.xsession
  • Restart xrdp to refresh settings set in previous line
  sudo service xrdp restart

Now you can connect to your machine. However, Ubuntu's default settings are to create a new session each time you log in instead of resuming your old session. Let us fix this.

Note:

In the next step you will have to edit a file by using a text editor. For example, you can use sudo nano /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini to edit the file we will tell you in a moment. To save the changes you can then press the key combination Ctrl + X (see then that at the bottom of the screen you get a question like Save modified buffer [...]?. Press then the y key, and finally hit Enter.

  • Edit the file /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini and change the items under the [xrdp1] header to:
[xrdp1]
  name=reconnect
  lib=libvnc.so
  username=ask
  password=ask
  ip=127.0.0.1
  port=ask5910
  • Log into your VM with RDP and use port -1 for the first session and start your virtual desktop.
  • Exit the RDP client (the VM keeps running and keeps resuming resources)
  • Log in again and use port 5910 (default value) and you will continue the previous session.

CentOS 7 & 8

  • Open your firewall: On your VM, modify the firewall settings to allow new inbound connections on port 3389, for example:

Note:

The following commands open port 3389 for the whole Internet. We strongly recommend that you limit this to a well-known location of yours, such as your Universitie's network and/or your house IP address to have a more secure set-up.

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=trusted --add-port=3389/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Check with:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=trusted --list-all
trusted (active)
  target: ACCEPT
  ports: 3389/tcp
  [...]
  • Install the Xrdp server: In our distribution, install packages tigervnc-server and xrdp:
  sudo yum groupinstall xfce
  sudo yum install tigervnc-server xrdp
  • Configure the Xrdp service: make the start at boot time, and start it for this session already:
  sudo systemctl enable xrdp.service
  sudo systemctl start xrdp

You can now use your Remote Desktop client from your laptop to connect to your VM's remote desktop. You may have to create a linux user first in your VM, with a password, such as:

sudo adduser fred  # first create a user `fred` (use a name that suits you best)
sudo passwd fred   # and then set the password for user `fred`

CENTOS 6

Note:

The following steps describe the procedure for setting up Xrdp in CentOS 6. Other distributions may require some variation, but the guidelines should remain analogous.

  • Open your firewall: On your VM, modify the firewall settings to allow new inbound connections on port 3389, for example by adding the following line to /etc/sysconfig/iptables:
  -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 3389 -j ACCEPT

reload the firewall configuration, using

  service iptables reload
  • Install the Xrdp server: In our distribution, install packages tigervnc-server and xrdp:
  yum install -y tigervnc-server xrdp
  • Configure the Xrdp service: make the start at boot time, and start it for this session already:
  chkconfig --levels 5 xrdp on
  service xrdp start

Note:

On newer Fedora-based systems, use

  systemctl enable xrdp
  systemctl start xrdp
  systemctl enable xrdp-sesman
  systemctl start xrdp-sesman

You can now log in on the virtual machine using RDP. From Windows or Mac OSX, use the Remote Desktop Connection client, sometimes supplied as an additional package to Microsoft Office. On a Linux desktop, use Rdesktop.

Note:

Make sure to set the display to millions of colors (Mac OsX) or high color (16-bits) (Windows), because thousands of colors (Mac OsX) or high color (15-bits) (Windows) will give you a non-descriptive error.

Windows

We have a full page on installing Windows, where we explain how serve access to Remote Desktop from it.

Credits: