Hello World, 

Today’s post is again about xRDP software solution.  xRDP is a Linux based software solution that provide remote desktop services capabilities.  After installing the xRDP software layer on a Linux based computer, a user can access the desktop remotely through the RDP protocol. This means that a user working on Windows can access remotely a linux desktop with no need to install any additional software.   

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you problaby know that have been explaining in simple ways how to perform the xRDP installation.  However, some of our readers are also wondering how to remove the xRDP software from their machine.  This question arise usually when there is a problem with the xRDP installation and people want to try from scratch or when they give up… This post will explain how to remove the xRDP software based on the way you have performed the installation..

Let’s quickly see how to perform such easy task….! 

Removing xRDP based on installation process

Remove it when Standard installation has been performed 

So, What’s a standard installation process for xRDP ?  A standard installation means that the standard xrdp package available within the Ubuntu repository has been used to perform the installation.  A fully compiled and package software solution is provided by Canonical and you simply need to execute the apt-get install command to perform the installation.  If you need more information about how to perform a standard installation of xRDP on Ubuntu 17.10, have a look at the following posts 

xRDP – How to Install on Ubuntu 17.10 -Manual Installation

xRDP – How to Install on Ubuntu 17.10 – Automated Install

Before removing xrdp package, the first step would be to stop the service by issuing the following command in a terminal console 

sudo systemctl stop xrdp

When using the standard installation procedure, it’s really easy to remove the xRDP package from your computer.  The command that you have to issue is basically the following 

sudo apt-get remove xrdp

This command will remove the packages but configuration files will not be deleted.  

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To remove packages and any configuration files, you should run the following command 

sudo apt-get purge xrdp

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In the screenshot, you can clearly see that configuration files are deleted as well. 

You can then reboot your machine and you should not have any xRDP software solution available on your system.  You can then either, try to re-install it if you had problems or use another remote desktop solution….

Remove it when Custom installation has been performed

 you have performed a custom installation of xRDP by running the install-xrdp.sh script (see xRDP – How to perform a custom installation – Scripted Install), it’s still possible to remove the xrdp package from your system. You will not use the built in apt-get remove or apt-get purge command to remove it. To get rid of the xrdp package on your system, you simply need to remove the following files and directories from your system.

• /etc/xrdp
• /usr/local/sbin/xrdp
• /var/run/xrdp.pid
• /var/run/sesman.pid 

and you would need to clean up the systemd services for xRDP by issuing the following command 

So, again, before uninstalling the xrdp software, you should first stop the service using the command 

sudo systemctl stop xrdp

then you can issue the following command to delete the xrdp files from your system 

rm -r /etc/xrdp 
rm -r /usr/local/sbin/xrdp 
rm /var/run/xrdp.pid
rm /var/run/xrdp-sesman.pid

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Then, you can remove the systemd service for xrdp by issuing the following command  

 

sudo systemctl disable xrdp

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Reboot your system so you have a really clean system at this stage…. 

Remove it when Custom installation (with checkinstall) has been performed

If you have been adventurous and you have tried this approach (see this post), the uninstall process is quite easy. Using the checkinstall command when compiling from source makes really easy to remove and re-install the compiled package. checkinstall will basically create a debian package and you can use the standard dpkg command to remove or re-install xrdp software…

So, again, before uninstalling the xrdp software, you should first stop the service using the command 

sudo systemctl stop xrdp

then you can issue the following command to remove the debian xrdp and xorgxrdp package created by the checkinstall from your system.   If you have followed the instructions describe here for the checkinstall, your deb packages are located under ~/Downloads/xrdp and ~/Downloads/xorgxrdp… 

To uninstall the xrdp package, you would simply issue the following command in a terminal console 

sudo dpkg -r xrdp

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To complete the uninstall process, you also need to remove the xorgxrdp package by issuing the following command 

sudo dpkg -r xorgxrdp

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Finally, you can remove xrdp service from the systemd. This is optional but if you want to have a clean system you might want to issue this command 

sudo systemctl disable xrdp

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Reboot your system and check that you cannot remote connect anymore through rdp client.  

Final Notes

As you can see, based on your installation approach, it’s possible to remove the xrdp package in an easy way actually. After explaining so often how to perform a successful installation of xRDP, it’s was time to explain how to remove the xRDP package.   Some people asked me how to remove the xrdp package because they couldn’t get it working and they wanted to redo the installation of xRDP  instead of reinstalling the full Ubuntu operating system.  

This post was due from a long time but I just recently found the time to write it.  Nowadays, the installation process for xRDP is so straight forward that we hope that this post would not be used too often. On the other hand, we are happy to have written this one so xRDP information is becoming quite complete..

Till next time 

See ya