Kali – How to setup RDP into a Kali Linux Box

I am a big fan of VM’s, but not such a fan of the tools used to connect to them in most instances.

Hyper-V, vSphere remote console, VMWare player, they all feel clunky, have inconsistent features and lack some of the basics I really enjoy from modern RDP.

Kali does not have this out of the box, so lets see if we can enable it.

Take a fresh kali install, and lets open a terminal:

apt-get update 
apt-get install xrdp 
systemctl start xrdp
systemctl start xrdp-sesman


systemctl enable xrdp
systemctl enable xrdp-sesman

Now there are a few configuration items we need to make.

Only one “X” session is allowed by default, which means if you will get a black screen after trying to connect if you are also on the machine locally.

It can also be a problem if your session gets disconnected, as there are times when re-connecting to the existing session will fail.

Lets make an edit to the /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh file.

Add these lines before the “test -x /etc/x11/xession && exec ” line:

unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
. $HOME/.profile

at this point, I like to reboot the machine to emulate a fresh session and see what we get:

Beautiful!

Now we have a full RDP session, with copy and paste and a 4k resolution!