Hello World,
In this post, we want to keep you updated on xrdp releases made recently available. The team behind xrdp package tries to update on a regular base new version of their xrdp package. The release cadence for xrdp package is usually every 3 months.
While working on the next iteration of the xrdp-installer script, we have discovered that a new release of the xrdp package has been made available on March 30, 2025.
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 features – Version 0.10.3
The latest and greatest version of xRDP is set to 0.10.3 . This package has been released a few days ago (March, 2025). This release includes some new features and some bug fixing. This release does not contains any security fix.
Let’s have a quick look on what this release brings up …. The following points are coming from github release announcement page
- The number of threads assigned to the x264 encoder can now be configured (#3366 #3367)
- X264 encoder support was included in the previous version and some improvements seems to be made in this release
- The colon in a share name passed from the client can be replaced with another character (#3389)
- Experimental support for utmp/wtmp is backported from devel. Thanks to @mlewissmith for this contribution.
- Add Hungarian keyboard (#3424 #3430)
- Improved keyboard fallback logic for xorgxrdp results in better support for some keyboard variants (e.g. Brazil ABNT2) #3478
- A new session type (Xvnc over Unix Domain Socket) has been added. Although intended primarily for Enterprise FIPS installations which use the Xvnc backend, this can be used with TigerVNC on any platform to improve security (#3453)
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)
-
- Fix potential memory leaks (#3380 #3388)
- Documentation fixes (#3403)
- Various Coverity warnings have been addressed (#3411 #3423)
- xrdp now copes with a mis-installed openh264 encoder (#3405 #3432)
- Bug #2518 which affects FIPS-compliant Enterprise installations can be addressed by using the new ‘Xvnc over UDS’ session type (#3453)
- FreeBSD: xrdp now avoids creating sessions with the same display number as forwarded X session over ssh (#3381 #3456)
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 46/47/48) 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…..
Ubuntu 25.04 will ship with version xrdp 0.10.1
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 Ubuntu 25.04 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 0.10.3.
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