XRDP on Manjaro (The Easy Way… When It Works)

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.

4 comments

Svenja
May 14, 2022 Reply

Excellent Adam, thank you very much for this post, I finally made it into my Manjaro box at home from my office’s Windows computer. Thanks especially for the “sed”s, as these were the mistakes I made in the past.
Again, thank you very much, you made my weekend. Cheers, Svenja.

Orestis
December 29, 2022 Reply

Thank you Adam for this straightforward guide. I can finally RDP into my manjaro pc from my windows. Worked like a treat.

DouglasG
June 20, 2023 Reply

Finally, this makes xrdp work for me. I did not run the yay line, instead I installed xrdp-git and xorgxrdp-git from the Add/Remove Software GUI program. The regular xrdp didn’t work, needed the Git version.

Bruce
June 17, 2024 Reply

Thanks, Adam. This was a big help! I finally got xrdp working. I had to use this line though:

yay -S xrdp xorgxrdp

xorgxrdp-git ran into type errors on my HP Proliant Miniserver.

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