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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I run xrdp on Ubuntu and connect to it from a windows machine using the Remote Desktop client. It has some restrictions- and setup issues (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/xrdp) but I use it daily to drive a remote CNC machine's host.

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Have you gotten it working with just those steps? Every single tutorial we have tried on our work machines have resulted in failure with Ubuntu 18.04. I can usually get to a login prompt but then logging in just gives me a black screen, or other times the login is always rejected.

VNC works, but is so painfully antiquated in comparison to RDP. It guzzles way too much bandwidth even if all you have is a blinking cursor on screen. I really wish there was a solid RDP server for Ubuntu. I'm quite surprised at the state of things on this front.

I recently found a script, that fixed my issues:

https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=14093

Thanks for the link!

Yes, I have gotten it working with those steps.

If you get the black screen I think that means somebody is logged into the console (the hardware X session). That's the big caveat (I used to use x11vnc, which let you vnc into the system's hardware X session then disconnect, and use the console directly).

Thanks. Do you know if you can have a vnc server running in tandem with xrdp? I'm not a big fan of the limitation of only one active session being allowed with xrdp as we do a lot of remote work on our Ubuntu boxes and VNC has been foolproof on that front. Being locked out of my box over the weekend (or during this extended stay at home period) because something got messed up with user sessions would be very annoying/limiting. With an active VNC session, I supposed I could use that as a fallback to ensure that I logout of the local session to ensure continuing connectivity with RDP.

As long as you can log in via SSH, there should be no software error combination w.r.t. graphical surfaces capable of locking you out of your system. From the SSH prompt you can fix everything, should that ever be needed.

Thanks. And you're right, that is very true. I'm just not very familiar myself with how to terminate local/remote graphical sessions via an SSH shell connection to juggle the limitations of xrdp on Ubuntu at the moment. Something for me to explore on a test box at some point I suppose.

If you are trying to setup xrdp on GCP/AWS/Azure then there is a VM available on the marketplace with preinstalled xrdp, GUI and lot of other opensource apps. You can spinoff your instance from that vm and you are good to go with RDP and remote desktop.

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/techlat...

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B084L3S2FF?qid=1583409...

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app...

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