Trying to enable RDP for gnome remote desktop

General system Newbie
1

Hello EndeavourOS experts,

I am trying to enable Gnome’s remote desktop sharing functionality. Looking around, I found that I need to install package gnome-remote-desktop which I did using pacman -Sy gnome-remote-desktop. This pulled in some dependencies for freerdp and libvncserver and afterward the “Sharing” section in gnome settings has “Screen Sharing” available.

It appears to me though that only VNC is available (and it works, I was able to connect) but I was hoping I could use RDP.

Currently, I do not see any RDP-related settings and trying to connect with RDP says that connection is refused (as if there is nothing listening for RDP).

How do I go about enabling RDP in Gnome’s remote desktop sharing?

2

Is rdp installed?
What is the output of yay -Qs rdp?
As far as I can see, rdp is a dependency of gnome-remote-desktop(assuming that is the program you are using; no experience here with Gnome).

yay -Si gnome-remote-desktop
Repositorium             : extra
Name                     : gnome-remote-desktop
Version                  : 41.2-1
Beschreibung             : GNOME Remote Desktop server
Architektur              : x86_64
URL                      : https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop
Lizenzen                 : GPL2
Gruppen                  : gnome
Stellt bereit            : Nichts
Hängt ab von             : cairo  freerdp  glib2  pipewire  systemd  libvncserver  libsecret  libnotify  dconf  fuse3  libxkbcommon
Optionale Abhängigkeiten : Nichts
In Konflikt mit          : Nichts
Ersetzt                  : Nichts
Größe des Downloads      : 117,00 KiB
Installationsgröße       : 374,39 KiB
Packer                   : Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) <heftig@archlinux.org>
Erstellt am              : Mi 08 Dez 2021 17:59:34 CET
Verifiziert durch        : MD5-Summe  SHA-256-Summe  Signatur

I would recommend remmina anyway for remote stuff.

3

So I get the following, which was added as a dependency when installing gnome-remote-desktop before:

[user@host ~]$ yay -Qs rdp
local/freerdp 2:2.4.1-2
    Free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)

By the way, can Remmina run as a server-side provider of connections? (i.e. listen for connections and share the screen when a client requests it). I will have a look, but this particular post I’m just trying to get RDP working in standard Gnome.

Thanks!

4

Installation seems correct so far. As I don’t use Gnome (never did since Gnome 2) I’m out now. Maybe someone, who uses this stuff, can guide you.

5

Found this statement in Gnome Wiki :

Currently there is no user interface for enabling RDP support, but in the future there will be.

This might explain your issue.

6

Ah that explains it! I also found how to check the logs and noticed this:

● gnome-remote-desktop.service - GNOME Remote Desktop
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/gnome-remote-desktop.service; static)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2021-12-20 13:18:50 GMT; 1h 26min ago
   Main PID: 1380 (gnome-remote-de)
      Tasks: 4 (limit: 38431)
     Memory: 56.9M
        CPU: 59ms
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/gnome-remote-desktop.service
             └─1380 /usr/lib/gnome-remote-desktop-daemon

Dec 20 13:18:50 ironyman systemd[835]: Starting GNOME Remote Desktop...
Dec 20 13:18:50 ironyman systemd[835]: Started GNOME Remote Desktop.
Dec 20 13:18:50 ironyman gnome-remote-de[1380]: Didn't initialize RDP server: not configured
Dec 20 13:18:50 ironyman gnome-remote-de[1380]: Initialized VNC server

Clearly I’ll need to wait for a newer version of Gnome and stick to VNC for a while longer…

7

There being no user interface, doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Just needs some reading of documentation. RDP surely can be set up in some config. Maybe someone can push you in the right direction.

8

As I told you before, I would consider switching to remmina. In my opinion, the best remote solution.

Remmina is a remote desktop client for POSIX-based computer operating systems. It supports the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), VNC, NX, XDMCP, SPICE, X2Go and SSH protocols

9

I already found these instructions.

However, I’d rather just use VNC for now. Was hoping I will get better performance it as at least for VirtualBox it seems to work better, but I can manage with VNC for a while.