xRDP – How to Install on Linux Mint

xRDP on Linux Mint 18.1

Assumptions

When we have performed our installation & testing, we have been using the following infrastructure

• We have performed a Fresh installation of the Linux Mint 18.1
• We have performed the installation on a Virtual Machine running on Hyper-V Server and Virtualbox

We are assuming that

• Your Linux Mint machine is connected to Internet (so you can download the necessary packages for the installation to occur). If you are not connected to internet, you will have to manually download the necessary packages and make them available on your offline machine

Installation Process 

Step 1 – Install xRDP package

At this stage, you should have a Linux Mint machine installed and ready to be used.  

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Once logged onto the system, open a terminal and issue the following command 

sudo apt-get install xrdp 

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Wait for the installation to complete. At the end of the process, check the version of xRDP installed on your system by issuing the command

xrdp -v  

As you can see in the screenshot, the version is 0.6.1.  

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At this stage, you would think that you are ready to go.  This is not the case.  If you try to perform a remote desktop session to your Linux Mint machine, nothing will happen or you will end up with the following error  

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In Linux Mint, this is a normal behavior because no VNC Server is being installed along with the xRDP package. This means that we need to install an additional package to establish a remote desktop session… 

Step 2 – Install TigerVnc Server package

In order to connect to the Cinnamon interface through the xRDP software, it’s necessary to install a specific VNC Server package :

• the TigerVNC server software.  

The TigerVNC Software is not available in the Ubuntu repository. You will need to download the installation package from the following location : https://bintray.com/tigervnc/stable/tigervnc/1.7.0#files/

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After you have downloaded the package, Open a Terminal console and move to your Download folders (or location where you have saved the packaged downloaded above)

cd Downloads

In the terminal console, to perform the installation, type the following

sudo dpkg -i tigervncserver_1.7.0-lubuntu1_amd64.deb

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You might see some warning and errors messages. Ignore these messages for the moment…

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To ensure that all the dependencies are installed, issue the following command in the Terminal console

sudo apt-get install -f

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Step 3 – Configure the xRDP keyboard Settings

Note :  You need to perform this action on the local Ubuntu machine (and not through the xrdp connection !!)

By default, the xRDP login screen will use an en-us keyboard layout. You remote session will also be using the en-us keyboard layout.  If you are using a different keyboard layout than the english one, you might want to use your actual keyboard layout and not the english us one.  

To configure you keyboard layout settings, in your terminal console; simply copy/paste this text and it will try to find out automatically your keyboard layout

# Set keyboard layout in xrdp sessions 
cd /etc/xrdp 
test=$(setxkbmap -query | awk -F":" '/layout/ {print $2}') 
echo "your current keyboard layout is.." $test
setxkbmap -layout $test 
sudo cp /etc/xrdp/km-0409.ini /etc/xrdp/km-0409.ini.bak 
sudo xrdp-genkeymap km-0409.ini

At this stage, you are done and ready to work

Perform the remote Connection 

At this stage, you should be able to perform a remote desktop session to your Linux Mint machine.  The first time you login, you might receive a message error.  If you try the second time, you should be presented with your Cinnamon Desktop environment and you can start working on your Linux Mint. 

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As already mentioned, you will be connected to your cinnamon desktop interface but it’s not the full one. In the screenshot above, you see that you are logged on in the software rendering version of cinnamon. 

Final Notes

This is the end of this post.  As you can see, if you install the xrdp package and the tigerVNC server software, you should be able to remote connect to your Linux Mint Operating System.  However, we will investigate a little bit further xRDP and Linux Mint topic. Indeed, in this post, we have been using the xrdp package version 0.6.1.   A newer version is available (0.9.0) which ships by default in Ubuntu 16.10

In the second part, we will see how we can install the xrdp version 0.9.0 on Linux Mint which bring more features and settings than xRDP 0.6.1