This is a short memo about setting up xrdp on my Raspberry Pi 2 with freshly installed Ubuntu Mate 16.04. The objective is to run RPI headless on run level 3 (multi-user.target in systemd parlance), but with the option to have GUI access from my Windows 10 workstation via RDP (90% of the time, I’ll be using MobaXterm to ssh into RPI). Primary role of this “machine” will be executing some DBA related python scripts, some of those scripts will produce some graphics, nothing fancy, but still a lot simpler to maintain if I can login from time to time to RPI desktop.

Install xrdp:

$ ssh -X alesk@rpi-mate
$ sudo apt-get install xrdp
$ reboot
// note down your IP
$ ip addr

On Windows desktop open Remote desktop and connect to RPI. You’ll get prompt like the one on the picture:

Enter username and password and wait for the desktop to appear. The problem however is that by default I was stuck with the US keyboard without the way to change it.
With some googling I found out, that I need to find my country code for the xrdp key mapping ini file, for example here. In my case, it’s 0x0424 – sl Slovenian.
I used country code for the naming of generated keyboard mapping file.

$ ssh alesk@rpi-mate
$ xrdp-genkeymap km-0424.ini
$ sudo cp km-0424.ini /etc/xrdp
$ sudo chown xrdp:xrdp /etc/xrdp/km-0424.ini
$ sudo service xrdp restart

Now, after reconnecting to my RPI with Remote Desktop client, I got desktop with functional Slovenian keyboard: