Setting Up Remote Desktop Access on Debian 12 with GNOME

Last updated: Aug 4, 2024

In a previous tutorial, I demonstrated how to set up a VNC server to establish remote access to a GNU/Linux system. You can find that brilliant guide here. However, with the increasing adoption of Wayland, and the growing complexity of VNC support on it, (see this article: Wayland FAQ), we will explore an alternative solution. In this article, we will look at how to set up an RDP server, which is the native solution for remote desktop access when using GNOME on the latest version of Debian.

⚠️ Please note this limitation: a remote connection can only be established if a session is open. This means we cannot connect to the GDM (GNOME Display Manager).⚠️

Enable Screen Sharing

With GNOME, we have two ways of enabling screen sharing: graphically or via CLI. We will look at both methods.

Graphic Method

Open Settings:

GNOME desktop showing the settings icon highlighted

In Settings, go to Sharing, then move the cursor in the top right-hand corner to the right to activate Sharing. Once enabled, click to Remote Desktop:

GNOME Settings navigation showing Sharing tab selected and Remote Desktop highlighted in the sub-menu

Enable Remote Desktop (1) with Remote Control (2) and set a Password (3):

Remote Desktop settings window showing options to enable desktop and remote control, device name, remote desktop address, and authentication fields

CLI Method

It can be useful to enable the remote desktop from CLI. Indeed, if we only have a ssh access to the machine we will be able to enable it. All the configuration will be done with the grdctl tool.

As a prerequisite, GNOME Remote Desktop must be enabled initially through the GUI. Once activated, it can be disabled or re-enabled with CLI:

Remote Desktop settings dialog with the Remote Desktop toggle turned on, showing connection details and authentication options

Show the status of the GNOME Remote Desktop service:

user@debian:~$ grdctl status
RDP:
	Status: disabled
	TLS certificate: /home/user/.local/share/gnome-remote-desktop/rdp-tls.crt
	TLS key: /home/user/.local/share/gnome-remote-desktop/rdp-tls.key
	View-only: yes
	Username: (empty)
	Password: (empty)

Set the user and the password:

user@debian:~$ grdctl rdp set-credentials user 'stdP@$$!'

Enable the RDP service:

user@debian:~$ grdctl rdp enable

Enable remote control:

user@debian:~$ grdctl rdp disable-view-only

To disable the RDP service:

user@debian:~$ grdctl rdp disable

Client connection

Connect from a Windows host

Simply open the Remote Desktop Connection client:

Screenshot showing Remote Desktop Connection window on the left and Windows Security credential prompt on the right

Connect from a Linux host

We need to install an RDP client such as FreeRDP. Once installed, we can proceed to connect to the server.

Install the freerdp2-wayland package:

root@host:~# apt install freerdp2-wayland

Connect to the RDP server:

std@host:~$ wlfreerdp /v:192.168.1.200 /u:"user" /p:'stdP@$$!' /w:1900 /h:1280 /cert:ignore

Computing

Music

Misc