Assuming you are on a Debian system with xorg already installed.
I set this up on my “Jukebox” computer that I have connected to my living room TV, which has a mostly vanilla install of Debian 12 and runs headless by default.
I first tried VNC but I was…unimpressed, you could say, with the client options for Windows (tried TightVNC and UltraVNC, both hot garbage), and the protocol itself had some red flags - 8 character password maximum was the biggest.
What I landed on was simply RDP, and you can use the default Windows client to connect via ip-address:port.
sudo apt install xrdp
sudo systemctl status xrdpThat second status command is optional, really, the installation automatically starts the systemd daemon and sets it to enabled. I went ahead and disabled it so that I have to start it manually via an SSH connection first, no reason to have it running by default in my case.
Guide I was reading (this) states you need to add the xrdp user to the ssl-certs group, but that group did not exist for me after installation. So far everything has worked fine without having done that.
I’m still searching for a way to duplicate the desktop on the TV and my laptop - I don’t want to buy a dedicated wireless KB + mouse for it, and I have to squint and/or blow the resolution way up. Seems like it would be an easy ask but I can’t find anything on it. I don’t think you can do it with xrdp but I am unsure.
I tried to start an X session locally while I had an RDP session connected and it simply wouldn’t start - I didn’t dig enough in the error log to figure out exactly why but it’s my best guess that you can’t have both going on. I don’t know enough about the inner workings of Xorg (nor do I really have any desire to know) to really go much further.
Topic for another day.
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