Installing Cinnamon Desktop Environment and XRDP service on Remote Ubuntu 22.04

Please refer to the guide How to Connect to a Linux Server Remotely to log in to your Remote Linux Server. Next, input your login password as prompted.

As the following several operations require the root permission, we will switch to the root user first using the command below.

sudo -i

After that, issue the commands below to update your list of packages.

apt update

To get the latest version of Cinnamon, you can use the Universe repository. The Universe repository contains a wide variety of software that is not part of the default Ubuntu installation. Therefore, we use the following command to get the universe repository first.

add-apt-repository universe
add-apt-repository multiverse

Then, we update all packages again and install the Cinnamon desktop environment.

apt update -y
apt install cinnamon -y

Issue the commands below to install xrdp service.

apt install xrdp -y

Next, enable the XRDP service and start it by issuing the following commands.

systemctl start xrdp && systemctl enable xrdp

The echo command writes the string “cinnamon” to the ~/.Xclients file. And the chmod command changes the permissions of the ~/.Xclients file to make it executable. The commands are configuring the ~/.Xclients file to run the “cinnamon” desktop environment when the X session starts.

echo "cinnamon" > ~/.Xclients
chmod +x ~/.Xclients

Open RDP service on your local machine. Then, input your Linux Ubuntu server IP in the Computer field and click Connect.

Then, you can see the RDP login interface. Enter your Linux server login username and password and click OK.

With the right credentials, you should be able to access your Cinnamon Desktop environment as follows.