How-to : Quickly configure RDP between a Windows (7) host and the Ubuntu 13.10 seed host
Note : This guide assumes that both the Windows 7 system and the Ubuntu seed host are reachable on the same network with port 3389 (default RDP) open.
Perform the following on the seed host
- Install XRDP application
$ sudo apt-get install -y xrdp
- Install a desktop environment
$ sudo apt-get install xfce4
- Configure XRDP to use the XFCE desktop environment. This is on a per user basis in their home directory. I imagine that a best practise here would be to setup a non root account but as this is a crash and burn environment I’m not concerned about security (famous last words).
$ echo xfce4-session > ~/.xsession
- Start the RDP service
$ sudo service xrdp restart
- Note the IP address or hostname if you’ve setup DNS for this server
$ hostname -I
On the Windows 7 system
- Run mstsc.exe
Select Start, type mstsc.exe and then run the RDP client application
- Enter hostname or IP address of seed host and you should see something like this…
UPDATE : Configure TAB Completion for RDP terminal windows
- edit xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml
vim ./home/<username>/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml
[Update : edit this file /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml to perform this for all users – their current profile xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml will need to be deleted but will be automatically be regenerated when they login the next time over RDP]
- replace
<property name=”<Super>Tab” type=”string” value=”switch_window_key”/>
with
<property name=”<Super>Tab” type=”string” value=”empty”/>
- Logout of the RDP session and then back in again for these changes to take affect
Hopefully you know what to do from here 🙂