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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

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.

  • 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
  • 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 connect to your machine. However, Ubuntu default settings are to create new session each time you log in and do not continue with your old session.

  • 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 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.