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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

I've found remote desktop setup immensely frustrating in the past. Every six months or so I'll think "Wouldn't it be cool if it I could have an Ubuntu AMI on EC2 I could boot and remote desktop into?" Then it's hours of googling and config settings editing. Hopefully someone will point me to the easy way I've been missing?

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Unfortunately RDP server on Linux is a bit tricky to set up, and involved some amount of compiling for me. On the other hand, I think `x11vnc` is pretty easy to get started with. I followed this guide, and it worked for me no problem: http://askubuntu.com/questions/229989/how-to-setup-x11vnc-to...

My guacamole server then connects to x11vnc so I still get RDP-like performance across the internet.

Edit: you'll also want to make an Upstart job for x11vnc so that it starts on boot, and restarts if (when) it dies. You can just copy any of the basic upstart jobs in /etc/init.d/*.conf and investigate. You also may want to make x11vnc start after your X server: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#run-a-job-before-another...

There is a lot of fiddly business :/

Did you check out freerdp? I believe its in most package managers.

Freerdp's server component is pretty experimental and mostly undocumented. The freerdp package you're referring to is a RDP client, not a server. This was the best result I got for googling "freerdp server": http://askubuntu.com/questions/475776/can-freerdp-be-used-as...

Very much still a compile-it-yourself experience. When I was setting up my RDP server on my Mint media center, I went with xrdp + x11rdp setup detailed in some guides at ScaryGliders.net, although the same guy as released a bunch of scripts to do it for you, see https://github.com/scarygliders/X11RDP-o-Matic

I don't really want to deal with recompiling stuff and manual updates though, and expect others to feel the same, which is why I advocated x11vnc to the GP.

Chrome remote desktop works with linux/mac/win now. Not sure if there is some headless way to set it up on EC2 and/or linux but I've got it running on my box at home and it works great.

https://github.com/rogaha/docker-desktop

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