Remote Desktop for Linux
Yeah, you’re thinking “Been there, done that. VNC is horrible”. You’re right, and VNC is difficult to setup, and if you can get it to function similar to remote desktop on Windows, its highly unsecure, and only allows one session at a time.
Which is why I’m not going to tell you how to setup VNC to manage your computer or server remotely with a graphical environment. I’m going to show you how to setup true remote desktop a la Windows, that is secure, allows for multiple concurrent sessions, and uses the standard remote desktop client found on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
What makes all this possible is an incredible program called Xrdp. You can find it here. It’s a daemon that runs on the remote machine, and allows you to connect to it using, you guessed it, remote desktop. Installation is a breeze, you simply unzip the file like so:
tar -xvzf xrdp-0.4.0.tar.gz
This will create a folder called “xrdp-0.4.0″. To install it, simply cd into the directory and run the following commands:
make
make install
That’s it! To start the daemon the commands are:
/usr/share/xrdp/sesman
/usr/share/xrdp/xrdp
The daemon will now run quietly in the background and answer RDP requests. I have not written an init script to start the daemon automatically on bootup, so you may have to shell in and restart the program if your computer reboots.
This program is extremely useful, especially if you have a server that needs to be managed by people who are not used to a command line environment, or if you are a home user with Linux on your desktops that you want to manage graphically. This can make it easier if you are transitioning from a graphically managed system like windows, to a Linux-based system.
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