How to Fix Black Screen Remote Desktop to Ubuntu From Windows 10, 11

You have received a black screen after initiating the remote connection to the Xrdp Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server on Ubuntu.

Fix Black Screen Remote Desktop to Ubuntu

1. Go to the Ubuntu desktop then open Terminal app.

2. Switch to root account using sudo -s command.

teevee@teevee:~$ sudo -s
[sudo] password for teevee: 
root@teevee:/home/teevee#

3. Open file using any text editor, in this case, we use nano text editor.

nano /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

4. Add below lines into the opened file before this line if test -r /etc/profile; then.

unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
. $HOME/.profile

The result after added those lines.

#!/bin/sh
# xrdp X session start script (c) 2015, 2017 mirabilos
# published under The MirOS Licence

if test -r /etc/profile; then
        . /etc/profile
fi

if test -r /etc/default/locale; then
        . /etc/default/locale
        test -z "${LANG+x}" || export LANG
        test -z "${LANGUAGE+x}" || export LANGUAGE
        test -z "${LC_ADDRESS+x}" || export LC_ADDRESS
        test -z "${LC_ALL+x}" || export LC_ALL
        test -z "${LC_COLLATE+x}" || export LC_COLLATE
        test -z "${LC_CTYPE+x}" || export LC_CTYPE
        test -z "${LC_IDENTIFICATION+x}" || export LC_IDENTIFICATION
        test -z "${LC_MEASUREMENT+x}" || export LC_MEASUREMENT
        test -z "${LC_MESSAGES+x}" || export LC_MESSAGES
        test -z "${LC_MONETARY+x}" || export LC_MONETARY
        test -z "${LC_NAME+x}" || export LC_NAME
        test -z "${LC_NUMERIC+x}" || export LC_NUMERIC
        test -z "${LC_PAPER+x}" || export LC_PAPER
        test -z "${LC_TELEPHONE+x}" || export LC_TELEPHONE
        test -z "${LC_TIME+x}" || export LC_TIME
        test -z "${LOCPATH+x}" || export LOCPATH
fi

unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
. $HOME/.profile

if test -r /etc/profile; then
        . /etc/profile
fi

test -x /etc/X11/Xsession && exec /etc/X11/Xsession
exec /bin/sh /etc/X11/Xsession

Save the file by press Ctrl + O then exit the editor by press Ctrl + X. Then go back to Windows machine and trying to connect to Ubuntu server using Remote Desktop.

As you can see, the black screen was gone. And that’s it.