RDP is a good protocol for remotely accessing a desktop. I personally use this for gaining remote access to my home network, while at work or elsewhere in the world.

I am running a VM with Ubuntu Mate on a server running Unraid OS. The following is a guide for how to set up XRDP once you have a Linux machine running somewhere/somehow. Since I am running Ubuntu Mate the details in the guide will reflect this.

1) Install XRDP

This is done using the package manager.

> sudo apt install xrdp

2) Set up the Mate desktop environment

I initially tried running XFCE and LXDE, on Xubuntu and Lubuntu respectively. However, I got neither to work, despite spending several hours trying. However, I got a mate desktop session up and running with Xubuntu and afterwards decided to switch to Ubuntu Mate so that I would not be running different desktops.

> echo "mate-session" > ~/.xsession

3) Set up TLS

RDP is safe by default - if you are connecting to a machine running a newer version of Windows. However, XRDP will by default use an unsafe connection. Luckily, by creating a self-signed certificate and changing 4 lines of config, it is possible to connect using TLS.

3a) Create self-signed certificate and key

> cd /etc/xrdp
> openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365

3b) Update xrdp.ini

Update /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini to

• enable TLS - while disabling older versions of SSL
• point to certificate and key files

  # /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
  certificate=/etc/xrdp/cert.pem
  key_file=/etc/xrdp/key.pem
  security_layer=tls
  ssl_protocols=TLSv1.1, TLSv1.2
  

4) Open the port

Ubuntu Mate comes with a firewall, so we need to open a port - 3389 is the default port for RDP.

> ufw allow 3389/tcp

5) Add keyboard layout (optional)

Unfortunately, the built-in Danish layout is wrong. Luckily, I stumbled upon this guy’s GitHub repo where he has a better layout and the updated XRDP keyboard config:

https://github.com/swiatecki/DevNetKeyboard

The commands below, however, are based on my forked version.

> cd /etc/xrdp
> wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MikaelElkiaer/DevNetKeyboard/master/km-00000406.ini
> chmod 644 km-00000406.ini
> rm xrdp_keyboard.ini
> wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MikaelElkiaer/DevNetKeyboard/master/xrdp_keyboard.ini

6) Restart service

That should be it for setting the service up. All that is left now is to restart and try it out.

> service xrdp restart