Contents

Overview

xrdp is a free open-source remote desktop server for Linux.
Installing xrdp on CentOS might be a little tricky since CentOS repositories does not contain the xrdp package.
Even the EPEL repository (Extra Packages Enterprise Linux) only contains an old version of xrdp.

CentOS xrdp HowTo

Add EPEL repo

First you need to add the EPEL repository that has an older version of xrdp.

rpm -Uvh http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/linux/fedora-epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Install xrdp from EPEL repo

yum install xrdp -y

Install dependencies

yum install tiger-vncserver autoconf automake libtool openssl-devel pam-devel libX11-devel libXfixes-devel -y

Download and install xrdp from source

Now that you have the older version of xrdp installed you can easily compile the latest version on top of the old one.

Download xrdp from sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/xrdp/files/ to /opt folder.

extract the content of the file

tar -xvzf xrdp-v0.6.1.tar.gz

compile and install xrdp:

cd xrdp-v0.6.1
./bootstarp
./configure
make
make install

start xrdp and make sure it is set to run at startup:

service xrdp start
chkconfig xrdp on

Customize xrdp settings

The xrdp service config files are located at ‘/etc/xrdp/’:
We will edit these three:

/etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini
/etc/xrdp/sesman.ini
/etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

Remove login options

Edit ‘/etc/xrdp/xrdp/ini’ and delete from xrdp2 block to the end of the file leaving only the xrdp1 option.

Limit access to certain group

Edit ‘/etc/xrdp/sesman.ini’ and change ‘TerminalServerUsers=tsusers’ to the group name you wan to allow access.
If unset or set to an invalid or non-existent group, login for all users is enabled.

Add environment variables

xrdp has a different set of environment variables than regular bash session.
Edit ‘/etc/xrdp/startwm.sh’ and add at the beginning of the file the environment variables you want.
for example add ‘/bin’ and ‘/sbin’ to the PATH variable: