AWS and xrdp

2021-09-04

I don't know who needs to know this but, but I ended up struggling with this for a while this evening — here are some notes on getting an Remote Desktop connection to a Linux EC2 instance on AWS using xrdp. ¹

You must do the following things:

Allow incoming connections on the RDP port (3389 — see AWS docs).
Install xrdp and everything with apt, etc.
Configure the correct window manager to run. I did this by editing ~/.xsession to look like this:
```
xsetroot -solid gray
exec xfce4-session
```
(Obviously I'm using xfce).
I'm connecting from a Windows machine, so using Remote Desktop Connection.

Oddly, the middle mouse button (three fingers) from the Windows machine didn't work, so I monitored X input using xev. The mouse click showed up as a keypress, which I just remapped in a script. 117 was the keycode I was seeing from xev.
```
xkbset m  
xkbset exp =m  
xmodmap -e "keycode 117 = Pointer_Button2"
```

This is probably deserving of more details — if you see this and have feedback, tweet at me, I guess. I just want to get this down somewhere so it comes up in a web search.

For context, I want to do some hobby development on a Linux machine but we mostly have Windows and Chrome devices sitting around the house. I could reimage an old machine, set up dual-boot, run VirtualBox, use WSL or Crostini, etc, but all of these options are kind of a pain. Rather, I'd like to just have a cloud instance I can connect to from anywhere (namely either the office or the couch) and just costs a few cents per hour. ↩