difficulty setting up ubuntu droplet with remote desktop access xrdp

Heya,

There are two possibilities

• On Ubuntu 24.04 or 22.04, XRDP doesn’t play nicely out of the box with GNOME or even Xfce unless properly configured.

• You get disconnected after login because XRDP tries to launch a session that crashes or closes immediately.

Set Xfce as the default session for XRDP. For the bob user, create (or modify) the file:

echo "startxfce4" > /home/bob/.xsession
chmod +x /home/bob/.xsession
chown bob:bob /home/bob/.xsession

Allow the bob user to use XRDP’s session. Sometimes you need to add them to the ssl-cert group:

sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert
sudo systemctl restart xrdp

Also, allow the XRDP port, by default it’s 3389 in your firewall, please.

You can try and changing the port to something else as I’ve seen people having issues in the past with this.

Heya @userdo

If xubuntu-desktop is causing issues, try using lxqt or mate, which are lighter and often more compatible with XRDP:

sudo apt install ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-mate-desktop

Then set the session:

echo "mate-session" > /home/bob/.xsession 
chown bob:bob /home/bob/.xsession 
chmod +x /home/bob/.xsession
sudo apt install lxqt 
echo "lxqt-session" > /home/bob/.xsession

Then restart xrdp:

sudo systemctl restart xrdp

Hope that this helps!