Hello World, 

As you probably know, Gnome 46 has been made available recently and as far as we know Ubuntu 24.04 should be shipping with this gnome release.  Gnome 46 release brings one of the most wanted feature which is Remote login capabilities.   We are not speaking about the Desktop sharing feature here.  This is a new capability that is built-in in the Gnome 46 Software.  

This post will quickly describe how we have tested the Remote Login feature that’s shipping with Gnome 46 release, how to enable it and how to use it.

Let’s do this right now… 

Overview 

We have been writing about xRDP software which provide remote desktop capabilities against Linux machines for a few years now.  As  a reminder, xRDP is a piece of software that enable remote desktop services on Linux.   This means that windows users can use their Remote desktop client (mstsc) and perform a remote connection to Ubuntu Computer.   xRDP was one of the few solution that would allow remote desktop connections using RDP protocol when no user was logged on into the system. 

Gnome 46 is a great release since it provides the most wanted feature related to Remote Desktop and remote login.  With Gnome 46, out of the box, you can achieve the same result as the one obtained with xRDP software.  This is really a great addition and it will definitely help people wanting to use RDP Protocol to connect to their remote Linux machines.  

Lab Setup & Operating System used

Setting the Infrastructure

So, initially, we wanted to test this feature on Ubuntu 24.04 (Beta Version) since Ubuntu 24.04 should be shipping with the Gnome 46 version.  Looking int the system settings interface, we realized quickly that the Remote Login feature was not (yet?) there.   On the screenshot below, you can just see the Desktop Sharing Feature that’s made available so far in this Ubuntu Release. 

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So, in order to test the latest version of Gnome 46, we needed to find and download an Operating System or Distribution that would include the Remote Login feature already.  Here, you have multiple choices.  You can use the Gnome OS Nightly build  or you can use the Fedora Workstation 40 distro (which is still in Beta)

We hav decided to download the Fedora workstation 40 and install it in our Lab infrastructure.  This post will not describe and explain how to install Fedora workstation since this is not the purpose of this post. 

Configuring selinux in permissive mode 

After you have installed your operating system, logged on into it and perform the necessary updates, the first thing you should do is configure the selinux module in such a way that you can indeed perform remote connection to your Fedora machine.   On Fedora, selinux is loaded by default and enabled as well.   If you do not change any settings related to selinux, when you will try to perform your remote connection, you will probably end up with the error.. “Unable to connect.  An Internal Error has occured ” 

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So, to configure selinux in permissive mode, perform the following actions 

Open a Terminal Console 

Edit (with admin rights)  the /etc/selinux/config file  by issuing the following command 

sudo nano /etc/selinux/config 

Provide credentials if requested

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Replace the line  

selinux=enforcing 

by 

selinux=permissive 

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Finally, reboot the machine in order to apply the changes you have just made.  

After the reboot, you can check the selinux configuration settings by issuing the following command

sestatus 

You should see in the output the information that the selinux mode is indeed in permissive mode 

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Configure Remote Login and Test it 

Enabling Remote Login feature 

This is really the easy part : )  

Open the System Settings page and on the left menu, click on system and then Remote Desktop option 

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In the Remote Desktop Page,  click on the Remote Login button.   Click on Unlock and enable the Remote Desktop feature   

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After enabling the feature,  the default port will be populated automatically and it will be set to 3389 (default port for RDP Protocol)  

The username and password field needs to be populated as well.  It seems that you need to use a user account that exists on the system.  For the demo, we have simply used the credentials of the logged on user.  

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When this task is completed, you can logout from your system and start to test the remote desktop capability provided by Gnome 46. 

Testing Remote Desktop Connection 

At this stage, you can simply move to another machine (can be a windows machine or a linux machine), you start your favorite RDP client and connect to the Fedora workstation.  You will need to provide your credentials

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If everything goes fine, you will be presented with the Gnome Login Screen page.  (This is really cool  !) 

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You might see a small popup about trusted connection.  Click on Continue to proceed.   

You can now select the user to be used and log into your Fedora machine remotely. If your credentials are correct, you will access your Fedora Desktop through the RDP Protocol.   You can see that we are using the Remote login feature by the small orange icon on the right top bar.   

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Some more testing 

Single session or multiple Session ?

with xRDP software, we know that a specific user can be connected either locally on the machine or remotely but not both  at the same time.  If you try to remote login while the same user is already logged in, you either got a black screen or you get disconnected immediately.   We wanted to test how the Remote login feature in Gnome 46 would handle this.  

So, the Remote login feature allows you to remotely connect to a Linux machine (running Gnome 46) when no one is connected.  However, if the same user is trying to remotely connect while already locally logged in, you will get a popup box that will show up.  This popup will allow you to forcibly connect but the local session will be “killed”.    

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If you are remotely logged on, and you try to login locally again using the exact same account, the same behavior is showing up.  You can forcibly kill the remote connection so you can perform your local login connection.

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So, this looks like the same behavior as xRDP Software.  You can be basically connected either locally or remotely but not both at the same time.  So, it’s not possible to take over an existing local session like you would do with Windows Remote Desktop when using the Gnome Remote Login. 

Sound redirection Capabilities 

Surprisingly, sound redirection is working flawless. Again, here, out of the box, sound redirection is possible through the Remote Login feature.   

Drive Redirection capabilities 

On the other hand, Drive redirection does not seem to be included in the Remote Login feature.  We do not know if this will be added in the future or not or if we are missing some configuration settings in order to make this happening. 

Remote login & Desktop Sharing coexistence  

If you enable remote login, the port for the connection will be set automatically to 3389.  If you also enable the Remote Desktop Sharing capability, the Desktop Sharing port will be assigned the port 3390 to avoid conflicts.  This means that you could potentially have two remote connection to the same machine. We did not test it yet but seems possible  

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Wayland Support

Another great feature provided by the Remote login is that the solution support Wayland Server instead of Xorg Server.  This is an important steps forward since Gnome is planning to drop slowly support for Xorg Server.  A lot of other applications are still using Xorg foundation to perform remote administration so we do not know how long it will take to see Xorg dropped completely.  But this feature demonstrate that Wayland Display Server can provide also Remote administration capabilities 

 

Final Notes

This is it for this post !  

Initially, we struggled a little bit to make it working because of the selinux configuration.  Once SELINUX was configured in permissive mode, we have been able to test the remote login feature. All in all, this is a great addition to the Gnome Desktop.   Desktop Sharing was already using RDP Protocol but the major drawback was that a user would need to be logged on locally on the machine.   The Remote login removes this constraints and make the feature really useful for remote administration from any Operating system.  

We think that this is really a great addition to Gnome Desktop.  Now, the question is about how xRDP software will be moving forward and if xRDP Software will still be needed in the future.  Possibly, xRDP should start working on adding support for Wayland because this is becoming the standard Display Server.  It seems to us that xRDP can still be useful in the Linux world on distributions not using Gnome Desktop.  

I would say interesting time coming ahead… hope you enjoyed this post 

Till next time 

See ya