Hello World,
Since our xrdp-installer script seems to be quite handy to some people out there, we are following a little bit more closely the releases and security announcements made by the team behind the xRDP software solution. We discovered that a new release has been made available two weeks ago. This version of the package seems to introduce some changes. These changes affect the way our famous installation script is working… We will need to update the script to take into account the latest changes introduced by this release…
So, let’s have a look at what’s new here……
Overview
xRDP is a software package that provide remote desktop capabilities against a Linux machine and mimics the Remote Desktop capabilities that can be found in Windows Operating system. Using xRDP, you can basically use your standard remote desktop client on Windows or Linux and you can remotely access your Linux Desktop interface. The team behind the software is releasing on regular basis updates. These updates can introduces new features and/or can address security issues.
You can find the latest releases & release notes for the xrdp package by visiting this page
New Release – Version 0.10.2
The latest and greatest version of xRDP is set to 0.10.2 . This package has been released a few weeks ago (Dec 24, 2024). This release includes some new features that seems to break (slightly) our famous xrdp installer script. Let’s have a quick look on what this release brings up….
H.264 encoding Support
With this release, xrdp is now supporting H.264 encoding technology which should help in reducing the amount of data transmitted over the network. This feature should bring a more responsive experience and smoother interaction when remote connecting through xrdp. To benefit from the H.264 feature, the xrdp package will need to be compiled including the H.264 package. You can check if your xrdp installation support H.264 encoding feature by issuing the command
xrdp -vIf you see, in the list of options, the value --enable-x264 or --enable-openh264, it means that your package include this new feature.
Since this is a new feature, there might be some known issues and limitations, you should review the github pages of xrdp team….
Unprivileged xrdp daemon
Till now, xrdp daemon was running under the root account. Debian team was not keen of having this process running under root account and they have made some changes. These changes have been integrated in the xrdp package and since version 0.10.2, xrdp daemon can run under an unprivileged user account. The xrdp-sesman process still runs under a privileged account because it handles user authentication and session management.
To run the xrdp daemon under unprivileged user is not automatic, you will need to perform some configuration changes and perform some testing. The xrdp team has provide some good guidance on how to achieve this and they also have provided a script to check permissions on the files and directories ensuring that configuration can be performed accordingly. We might publish a quick and dirty post about this new configuration….
Specific Libfuse version required
Another change that has been introduced with this release is that the libfuse version needs to be > 3.1.0. The xrdp-installer script is specifically using an older package version and you will probably get an warning message asking you to install later version of the package. We will update the script to install latest package and we think that recent linux distributions should not be impacted by this change…
Security fixes & Bug Fixes
No security fixes are included in this release but a number of small bug fixes have been shipped with this release. We have listed them hereafter (from github release announcement page)
- Redirector improvements. Removed some unnecessary limitations on filename lengths, and improved compatibility with FreeRDP (#3165 #3194). Special thanks to @tsz8899 for raising this and working with the team.
- Fix misreported cache size (#3212)
- Clarified Policy setting in sesman.ini (#3235)
- Fixed a regression in support for non-resizeable VNC sessions (#3242)
- A regression in chansrv functionality when used in standalone mode for VNC sessions has been fixed (#3283). This was introduced by the move to the v0.10.x sockets dir layout
- Fix AltGr on Spanish keyboard (#3313)
- The KDE Dolphin file manager can now save files to a mapped drive (#3300)
- pam_limits.so is now included explicitly for Debian and derivatives (#3347)
Wayland Support ? Not yet !
Like with previous releases, xRDP still does not support Wayland Display Server and still relies on the aged Xorg Display Server. More and more distribution are shipping with Wayland Display server as default one. So far, this is not an issue because xRDP can fall back to the Xorg display server. However, it seems that more and more software maintainer would like to move away completely from Xorg software because it’s considered legacy software. A good example is the team behind Gnome Desktop who is looking into removing support for Xorg Display Server.
We think that it still might take some time before this happens. But it would be cool to see an xRDP software release that would include Wayland support. Gnome Remote login (feature of Gnome 46/47) is basically demonstrating that it’s possible to perform RDP connection against Wayland session. We are looking forward to see if this would happens soon.
What’s the impact for me ?
If you are using a well established distribution like Ubuntu or Debian, and if you have performed the installation from the distribution repository, you might not be running the latest version of the xRDP package. The latest version of the xrdp package is usually not being updated automatically in well established distribution. For Ubuntu 24.04/24.10, the package available (at time of writing) is still version 0.9.24. Do not expect new xrdp package to be shipped in this releases…..
If you have performed the installation from sources, you will have to update yourself the package. You should remove the version installed on your system and recompile from source. So, if you want to use the latest version of xRDP, you will need to compile the software from sources.
We have developed a small script that can help automate xrdp installation from sources. However, we will need to test and probably update our famous script in order to support this latest xrdp releases which includes some changes that we need to take into account….
Final Notes
This is it for this post !
xRDP team is quite active lately and they are quite busy. They have indeed to maintain the phasing out version (0.9.x Branch) by issuing some bug & security fixes but they have also to maintain the newest branch release (0.10.x) which provide the latest improvements.
At this stage, our focus will be to test this new package against Ubuntu 24.04 and 24.10 and see if anything has changed. We will then need to update our installation script and release a new version in order to support changes introduced by xrdp version 0.10.2.
So, we will be busy in the coming days/weeks and we will try to release the new version of the script in the near future
Stay tuned
Till Next time