playbooks/roles/vhosts/xfce_xrdp_minimal

xfce_xrdp_minimal

Minimal XFCE4 + XRDP role for constrained Ubuntu/Debian VPS hosts.

What it does

• Installs only the required desktop and XRDP packages
• Installs the Xorg backend needed by XRDP (xserver-xorg-core, xorgxrdp)
• Installs open-source Chromium browser
• Installs Chinese font support (fonts-noto-cjk)
• Creates ~/.xsession for the target desktop user
• Enables xrdp and xrdp-sesman
• Disables compositor and animations to reduce resource usage
• Optionally opens TCP 3389 with UFW if UFW is present
• Creates or updates the desktop user and ensures it has a usable local password for XRDP login

Variables

• xfce_user: desktop login user, default ubuntu
• xfce_packages: minimal package list
• xfce_enable_ufw: whether to allow the RDP port with UFW
• xfce_rdp_port: RDP port, default 3389
• xfce_disable_compositor: default true
• xfce_disable_animations: default true
• xfce_user_groups: supplemental groups for the desktop user, default ["sudo"]
• xfce_user_password_plaintext: required password for the desktop user so XRDP can authenticate

Example playbook

- hosts: vps
  become: true
  roles:
    - role: roles/vhosts/xfce_xrdp_minimal

Manual validation

Run these on the server after connecting through RDP:

systemctl status xrdp --no-pager --full
echo "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE"
free -m
passwd -S ubuntu

Expected:

• xrdp is active
• XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11
• memory stays under the host budget
• ubuntu is not locked and can authenticate with the password you provided