Month: April 2022

Updated 2025-01-05

I have a much lengthier post on getting XRDP to work on Manjaro, which happens to be one of the top Google results for getting the whole apparatus to work.

And to that end, I want to provide a quick and easy way of getting XRDP to work on Manjaro for folks who aren’t interested in prologue and might be afraid to edit weirdly-named files on their own.

Caveat Emptor

The easy way doesn’t always work. Reasons include:

• The xrdp and xorgxrdp(+/- git) packages need to be in perfect alignment. If one is updated while the other is not, sadness will result.
• The xrdp and xorgxrdp(+/- git) packages need to both be properly signed, which has been an on-and-off issue for the past couple years.
• If you’re running a desktop environment that’s not XFCE, then you’ll have to make some modifications. Fortunately, if you’re here, you’re probably running the default Manjaro desktop environment, which happens to be XFCE.

Should the easy way fail, you may want to visit my original post on doing it the hard way.

The Steps

Edit: Previous versions of these instructions relied on xorgxrdp-git because the main xorgxrdp package was suffering from maintenance issues. Those issues appear to have been resolved, with instructions updated accordingly.

Further, the ~/.xinitrc script has been significantly improved. Those lines have been removed from this edition.

Assuming you can ssh into your machine, the commands are as follows:

sudo pacman -Sy base-devel yay
yay -S xrdp xorgxrdp
echo "allowed_users = anybody" | sudo tee -a /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
sudo systemctl enable xrdp
sudo systemctl start xrdp

What They Do

• The first line installs the packages you’ll need to build and install xrdp and its friends.
• The second line installs xrdp and xorgxrdp, which are sort of the point of this exercise
• The third line permits you to enter an X (desktop) session without being at the computer – sorta important if your goal is to remote in.
• Lines 4-5 enable and start the xrdp service.

Good Luck!

Let me know if any of this ceases to function and I’ll do my best.