I'm running Slackware 15 on three boxes, A, B and C. I'm running xrdp and trying to connect via xfreerdp. No matter what box runs xrdp and no matter what box I try to connect from, I get a black screen. I tried to connect from a windows box - black screen. Tried a different rdp client - black screen.

So at this point I conclude either xrdp is broken, or I'm doing something fundamentally wrong in that I'm trying it on three boxes and all three give me the same results - black screen.

I'm really not sure where to go with this one. What can we do next to troubleshoot this?

First I'd check the machines are reachable (ping, traceroute, etc). Then I'd try to connect to the RDP ports with something like ncat. If you get that far, check the xrdp.log and xrdp-sesman.log. I think the Xorg server being used by Xrdp drops its own log outside of the system's normal log so look at that. It might be in ~/ or maybe /var/log. Make sure Xrdp is running a working window manager. Right now I'm using Fvwm2 but when I RDP it wants me to use XFCE (you can configure this). Check if the module is findable for the Xserver (/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/libxorgxrdp.so on my install). Check if your keys are correct. I have xrdp-0.9.2.1 with xorgxrdp-0.9.19 working (built from source). rdesktop (on PC) and the Microsoft client (on mobile, Android) I've seen working. xfreerdp had to have some odd switch when I tried to use it last (/relax-order-checks) at the end of the command line so I stuck with rdesktop. As I recall, the config files for Xrdp are very touchy so let them at default as much as you can.

I'll give it a go if you can post a link to the instructions you followed to install & configure xrdp.

OMFG....

I added /relax-order-checks to the xfreerdp line and it connected.

I tried remmina, but it gets stuck in a loop trying to connect.

I tried it from a windows machine and now it works? It would not connect yesterday. Was there a full moon yesterday?

And FWIW, rdesktop performance is much better than xfreerdp at least for my setup. Not sure why.

Followup: I've been running this on four different computers and it works well. The missing piece of the puzzle was xorgxrdp. I read somewhere to not use this, but without it I could not get this to work. I installed xorgxrdp, and it fired right up like magic.

Is it related ?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2242028


You can try rebuilding freerdp with:

This sounds familiar to me.

What I had to do is add an Xwrapper.config file to the /etc/X11 directory, with the following content:

allowed_users = anybody

found on: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/system/xrdp/

Hope this helps,