Hello World,
So, in our previous post (see
xrdp – New release available (0.10.2)), we have seen that a new release of xrdp package has been made available. Our famous xrdp-installer script will always try to download the latest stable release of xrdp if you have selected the custom installation option. With each release of Ubuntu, we usually perform a quick check to see and validate that the xrdp-installer script is still running as expected. We need to perform the same validation test each time a new xrdp package is released.
So, in the past few days, we have performed some quick and dirty tests using our xrdp-installer script (1.5.2) and we found out that a update of the script might be necessary…. since the xrdp package 0.10.2 introduces some changes
Keep reading…
Overview
By now, you should know that the xrdp-installer script aim to ease installation and post-configuration actions of xRDP on top of Ubuntu Operating system. xRDP is a piece of software that enable remote desktop services on Linux. This means that windows (or linux) users can use their Remote desktop client and perform a remote connection to an Ubuntu Computer…
The xrdp-installer script can be used to perform a standard installation (using old xrdp package available from Ubuntu repository) or you can perform a custom installation where the xrdp software is compiled from the latest released source file made available by the xrdp team. The latest xrdp package version (i.e. 0.10.2) has introduced some changes and these changes have an impact on different Ubuntu releases…..
So, let’s have quick look at what issues we have encountered with all the recent changes….
Test 1 – Standard installation on Ubuntu 24.10
Incompatible xrdp server detected…
We have been notified by a few number of followers that the xrdp-installer script didn’t seem to work properly against Ubuntu 24.10. So, we decided to give it a try and we also decided to test the standard installation mode. Since we are using older package than the latest release version, no issues or less issues should be present and a quick fix can probably be provided. So, after downloading the script, we have started the installation process (with no parameters) and we have seen that the installation went through properly (no errors on the screen).
We checked that the xrdp software was installed on the system (xrdp -v) and as we can see on the screenshot below, everything seems to be correct
Click on Picture for better Resolution
We logged off from this computer and moved to a windows machine in order to test our setup. We started the remote desktop client and performed the initial connection. At this stage, again, everything seemed normal and behaved as expected. We could see the xrdp login screen. We then entered our credentials and almost immediately we were disconnected. we tried multiple times and check again that the xrdp services were up and running. No dice
To debug and investigate this issue, we looked into all the logs files. So, we found some interesting information in the ~/.xorgxrdp.xx.log file. As you can see in the screenshot below, the xrdp package version 0.9.24 (package coming from ubuntu repo) seems to be not compatible with the Ubuntu 24.10. The message is clearly stating… “Incompatible xrdp server detected – please recompile”
Click on Picture for better Resolution
Test 2 – Custom installation on Ubuntu 24.10
Required libfuse or fuse package missing….
Based on the results of the first test, it was time to perform a custom installation. The custom installation mode would grab the latest stable release version of the xrdp package (0.10.2) and will compile the xrdp software solution from sources. We assume that you have some experience with the script. As a reminder, to start the custom installation, you have to use the -c parameter when executing the script…. something like this
./xrdp-installer-1.5.2.sh -c
The installation process didn’t go through and we have received a nice failure message… Looking at the problem, we have noticed that the script is informing us that we need to install an additional package onto the Ubuntu system. (see screenshot below)
Click on Picture for better Resolution
So, after reading the release notes for xrdp 0.10.2, it is clearly mentioned that this package will need a newer version of the libfuse library. The xrdp-installer script is installing an older version of the libfuse package. With xrdp package 0.10.2, the libfuse version required to perform successfully the compilation process needs to be higher than 3.1.0
So based on this information and after manually installing the missing package, we re-ran the script and this time, it went a step further and the installation proceeded till the end…
xrdp services warning & errors
The installation went through but we decided the review the output console to check that no other problem would have been detected by the script. As you can see in the screenshot below, we have also another error (still on Ubuntu 24.10). Failed to enable unit service : Unit service xrdp-sesman.service does not exists.
Click on Picture for better Resolution
So, the installation went through correctly but some xrdp services does not seems to be available or working as expected on Ubuntu 24.10. So, we wanted to check this and we have issued the following command
sudo systemctl status xrdp
The screenshot below shows the results. The xrdp service is up and running.
Click on Picture for better Resolution
However, if you look more carefully into the picture, you will notice that the usual path for the xrdp service is not present. On Ubuntu 24.10, the xrdp service is running from the location /etc/init.d/xrdp. On previous version of Ubuntu, the path would have been located under /lib/systemd/system/xrdp.
We would have expect that xrdp-sesman service would be available as well but running the command
sudo systemctl status xrdp-sesman
Click on Picture for better Resolution
The screenshot shows that the service is not available and does not exists on the Ubuntu 24.10. We didn’t further investigate about this “potential” issue. The thing is that after running the xrdp script and even if the xrdp-sesman is not available, everything is working as expected.
Test 3 – Standard & Custom installation on Ubuntu 24.04
Except the incorrect libfuse package version which needs to be higher than 3.1.0, the xrdp-installer script was able to perform the xrdp installation in standard mode and custom mode. The xrdp functionality was working as expected. We were able to perform remote sessions against the Ubuntu 24.04 computers.
Test 4 – Standard & Custom installation on Ubuntu 22.04
Except the incorrect libfuse package version which needs to be higher than 3.1.0, the xrdp-installer script was able to perform the xrdp installation in standard mode and custom mode. The xrdp functionality was working as expected. We were able to perform remote sessions against the Ubuntu 22.04 computers.
Test 5 – Standard & Custom installation on Ubuntu 20.04
Except the incorrect libfuse package version which needs to be higher than 3.1.0, the xrdp-installer script was able to perform the xrdp installation in standard mode and custom mode. The xrdp functionality was working as expected. We were able to perform remote sessions against the Ubuntu 22.04 computers.
Final Notes
This is it for this quick post !
As you can see, the new release of the xrdp package has introduced some changes. As we have seen, the xrdp-installer script (1.5.2) needs to be updated in order to avoid some of the basic issues encountered with the release of xrdp 0.10.2. A new version of the script will be made available quite soon which should tackle the libfuse package issue. If we fix this minor issue, the script should be working again as expected.
Till next time
See ya
