Did you ever have the need to access your Linux Mint MATE desktop from your Windows Environment? We do! And also our clients, so this Thinfinity® Workspace guide is for all our Linux-savvy people who might need this solution.
This tutorial has been done under the latest Linux Mint release, which happens to be the 19.3 Tricia release with MATE desktop. We will also use XorgXRDP from neutrinolabs repositories.
XorgXRDP is a set of drivers (screen device, keyboard, and mouse) for X.org enabling the use through an RDP session with XRDP.
First, we need to have our packages/dependencies up to date. To do this, just run
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
Once we did the update, we can now start installing Xorg from our terminal.
$ sudo apt install xrdp xorgxrdp
It’s possible you might have to install some missing dependencies. In our case, we were missing xorg-video-abi-23 and xserver-xorg-core dependencies.
We can install them with the following commands:
$ sudo apt install xorg-video-abi-23
$ sudo apt install xserver-xorg-core
Now that we have these missing dependencies installed, we can perform the Xorg XRDP installation again.
$ sudo apt install xrdp xorgxrdp
IMPORTANT NOTE: You will notice that installing this package will trigger the removal of packages *xserver-xorg-hwe-18.04* which might be used or needed by your system. So, you might lose keyboard and mouse input when connecting locally to the machine. To fix this issue, you’ll have to issue the following command.
$ sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-all
We also need to add the xrdp user to the ssl-certs and need to open our 3389 port on our Firewall
$ sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert
$ sudo ufw allow 3389/tcp
Be aware, by typing the ufw allow 3389/tcp you would allow any connection from the outside from any IP address. To be more granular on this, we can specify our IP address by typing the“sudo ufw allow from 192.168.0.219 to any port 3389 proto tcp” By doing this, I’m only allowing my private IP address to access our Linux VM.
Now that we have finished installing xRDP, we have to publish this Linux Mint desktop in our Thinfinity® Workspace.
We just have to go to our profile editor, create the RDP connection and type the Linux IP as shown in the following screenshot.
Now we are able to access our Linux Mint Desktop, from any HTML5 compatible browser, from any device we like. Beautiful, isn’t it?
First, we need to have our packages/dependencies up to date. To do this, just run
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
Once we did the update, we can now start installing Xorg from our terminal.
$ sudo apt install xrdp xorgxrdp
It’s possible you might have to install some missing dependencies. In our case, we were missing xorg-video-abi-23 and xserver-xorg-core dependencies.
We can install them with the following commands:
$ sudo apt install xorg-video-abi-23
$ sudo apt install xserver-xorg-core
Now that we have these missing dependencies installed, we can perform the Xorg XRDP installation again.
$ sudo apt install xrdp xorgxrdp
IMPORTANT NOTE: You will notice that installing this package will trigger the removal of packages *xserver-xorg-hwe-18.04* which might be used or needed by your system. So, you might lose keyboard and mouse input when connecting locally to the machine. To fix this issue, you’ll have to issue the following command.
$ sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-all
We also need to add the xrdp user to the ssl-certs and need to open our 3389 port on our Firewall
$ sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert
$ sudo ufw allow 3389/tcp
Be aware, by typing the ufw allow 3389/tcp you would allow any connection from the outside from any IP address. To be more granular on this, we can specify our IP address by typing the“sudo ufw allow from 192.168.0.219 to any port 3389 proto tcp” By doing this, I’m only allowing my private IP address to access our Linux VM.
Now that we have finished installing xRDP, we have to publish this Linux Mint desktop in our Thinfinity® Workspace.
We just have to go to our profile editor, create the RDP connection and type the Linux IP as shown in the following screenshot.
Now we are able to access our Linux Mint Desktop, from any HTML5 compatible browser, from any device we like. Beautiful, isn’t it?
