The LinuxServer.io team brings you another container release featuring:

• regular and timely application updates
• easy user mappings (PGID, PUID)
• custom base image with s6 overlay
• weekly base OS updates with common layers across the entire LinuxServer.io ecosystem to minimise space usage, down time and bandwidth
• regular security updates

Find us at:

• Blog - all the things you can do with our containers including How-To guides, opinions and much more!
• Discord - realtime support / chat with the community and the team.
• Discourse - post on our community forum.
• Fleet - an online web interface which displays all of our maintained images.
• GitHub - view the source for all of our repositories.
• Open Collective - please consider helping us by either donating or contributing to our budget

linuxserver/rdesktop

Rdesktop - Containers containing full desktop environments in many popular flavors for Alpine, Ubuntu, Arch, and Fedora accessible via RDP.

Supported Architectures

We utilise the docker manifest for multi-platform awareness. More information is available from docker here and our announcement here.

Simply pulling lscr.io/linuxserver/rdesktop:latest should retrieve the correct image for your arch, but you can also pull specific arch images via tags.

The architectures supported by this image are:

Architecture	Available	Tag
x86-64	✅	amd64-<version tag>
arm64	✅	arm64v8-<version tag>
armhf	❌

Version Tags

This image provides various versions that are available via tags. Please read the descriptions carefully and exercise caution when using unstable or development tags.

Tag	Available	Description
latest	✅	XFCE Alpine
ubuntu-xfce	✅	XFCE Ubuntu
fedora-xfce	✅	XFCE Fedora
arch-xfce	✅	XFCE Arch
debian-xfce	✅	XFCE Debian
alpine-kde	✅	KDE Alpine
ubuntu-kde	✅	KDE Ubuntu
fedora-kde	✅	KDE Fedora
arch-kde	✅	KDE Arch
debian-kde	✅	KDE Debian
alpine-mate	✅	MATE Alpine
ubuntu-mate	✅	MATE Ubuntu
fedora-mate	✅	MATE Fedora
arch-mate	✅	MATE Arch
debian-mate	✅	MATE Debian
alpine-i3	✅	i3 Alpine
ubuntu-i3	✅	i3 Ubuntu
fedora-i3	✅	i3 Fedora
arch-i3	✅	i3 Arch
debian-i3	✅	i3 Debian
alpine-openbox	✅	Openbox Alpine
ubuntu-openbox	✅	Openbox Ubuntu
fedora-openbox	✅	Openbox Fedora
arch-openbox	✅	Openbox Arch
debian-openbox	✅	Openbox Debian
alpine-icewm	✅	IceWM Alpine
ubuntu-icewm	✅	IceWM Ubuntu
fedora-icewm	✅	IceWM Fedora
arch-icewm	✅	IceWM Arch
debian-icewm	✅	IceWM Debian

Application Setup

The Default USERNAME and PASSWORD is: abc/abc

Unlike our other containers these Desktops are not designed to be upgraded by Docker, you will keep your home directory but anything you installed system level will be lost if you upgrade an existing container. To keep packages up to date instead use Ubuntu's own apt, Alpine's apk, Fedora's dnf, or Arch's pacman program

You will need a Remote Desktop client to access this container Wikipedia List, by default it listens on 3389, but you can change that port to whatever you wish on the host side IE 3390:3389. The first thing you should do when you login to the container is to change the abc users password by issuing the passwd command.

Modern GUI desktop apps (including some flavors terminals) have issues with the latest Docker and syscall compatibility, you can use Docker with the --security-opt seccomp=unconfined setting to allow these syscalls or try podman as they have updated their codebase to support them

If you ever lose your password you can always reset it by execing into the container as root:

docker exec -it rdesktop passwd abc

By default we perform all logic for the abc user and we recommend using that user only in the container, but new users can be added as long as there is a startwm.sh executable script in their home directory. All of these containers are configured with passwordless sudo, we make no efforts to secure or harden these containers and we do not recommend ever publishing their ports to the public Internet.

Options

All application settings are passed via environment variables:

Variable	Description
LC_ALL	Set the Language for the container to run as IE fr_FR.UTF-8 ar_AE.UTF-8
NO_DECOR	If set the application will run without window borders. (Decor can be enabled and disabled with Ctrl+Shift+d)
NO_FULL	Do not autmatically fullscreen applications when using openbox.

Language Support - Internationalization

The environment variable LC_ALL can be used to start this image in a different language than English simply pass for example to launch the Desktop session in French LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8. Some languages like Chinese, Japanese, or Korean will be missing fonts needed to render properly known as cjk fonts, but others may exist and not be installed. We only ensure fonts for Latin characters are present. Fonts can be installed with a mod on startup.

To install cjk fonts on startup as an example pass the environment variables(Debian):

-e DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/mods:universal-package-install
-e INSTALL_PACKAGES=fonts-noto-cjk
-e LC_ALL=zh_CN.UTF-8

PRoot Apps

All images include proot-apps which allow portable applications to be installed to persistent storage in the user's $HOME directory. These applications and their settings will persist upgrades of the base container and can be mounted into different flavors of rdesktop containers. IE if you are running an Alpine based container you will be able to use the same /config directory mounted into an Ubuntu based container and retain the same applications and settings as long as they were installed with proot-apps install.

A list of linuxserver.io supported applications is located HERE.

Open Source GPU Acceleration

For accelerated apps or games, render devices can be mounted into the container and leveraged by applications using:

--device /dev/dri:/dev/dri

This feature only supports Open Source GPU drivers:

Driver	Description
Intel	i965 and i915 drivers for Intel iGPU chipsets
AMD	AMDGPU, Radeon, and ATI drivers for AMD dedicated or APU chipsets
NVIDIA	nouveau2 drivers only, closed source NVIDIA drivers lack DRI3 support

Nvidia GPU Support

Nvidia is not compatible with Alpine based images

Nvidia support is available by leveraging Zink for OpenGL support. This can be enabled with the following run flags:

Variable	Description
--gpus all	This can be filtered down but for most setups this will pass the one Nvidia GPU on the system
--runtime nvidia	Specify the Nvidia runtime which mounts drivers and tools in from the host

The compose syntax is slightly different for this as you will need to set nvidia as the default runtime:

sudo nvidia-ctk runtime configure --runtime=docker --set-as-default
sudo service docker restart

And to assign the GPU in compose:

services:
  myimage:
    image: myname/myimage:mytag
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - driver: nvidia
              count: 1
              capabilities: [compute,video,graphics,utility]

Usage

To help you get started creating a container from this image you can either use docker-compose or the docker cli.

Note

Unless a parameter is flaged as 'optional', it is mandatory and a value must be provided.

docker-compose (recommended, click here for more info)

---
services:
  rdesktop:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/rdesktop:latest
    container_name: rdesktop
    security_opt:
      - seccomp:unconfined #optional
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
      - /path/to/rdesktop/data:/config #optional
    ports:
      - 3389:3389
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri #optional
    shm_size: "1gb" #optional
    restart: unless-stopped

docker cli (click here for more info)

docker run -d \
  --name=rdesktop \
  --security-opt seccomp=unconfined `#optional` \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -e TZ=Etc/UTC \
  -p 3389:3389 \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock `#optional` \
  -v /path/to/rdesktop/data:/config `#optional` \
  --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri `#optional` \
  --shm-size="1gb" `#optional` \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  lscr.io/linuxserver/rdesktop:latest

Parameters

Containers are configured using parameters passed at runtime (such as those above). These parameters are separated by a colon and indicate <external>:<internal> respectively. For example, -p 8080:80 would expose port 80 from inside the container to be accessible from the host's IP on port 8080 outside the container.

Parameter	Function
-p 3389:3389	RDP access port
-e PUID=1000	for UserID - see below for explanation
-e PGID=1000	for GroupID - see below for explanation
-e TZ=Etc/UTC	specify a timezone to use, see this list.
-v /var/run/docker.sock	Docker Socket on the system, if you want to use Docker in the container
-v /config	abc users home directory
--device /dev/dri	Add this for GL support (Linux hosts only)
--shm-size=	We set this to 1 gig to prevent modern web browsers from crashing
--security-opt seccomp=unconfined	For Docker Engine only, many modern gui apps need this to function as syscalls are unknown to Docker

Environment variables from files (Docker secrets)

You can set any environment variable from a file by using a special prepend FILE__.

As an example:

-e FILE__MYVAR=/run/secrets/mysecretvariable

Will set the environment variable MYVAR based on the contents of the /run/secrets/mysecretvariable file.

Umask for running applications

For all of our images we provide the ability to override the default umask settings for services started within the containers using the optional -e UMASK=022 setting. Keep in mind umask is not chmod it subtracts from permissions based on it's value it does not add. Please read up here before asking for support.

User / Group Identifiers

When using volumes (-v flags), permissions issues can arise between the host OS and the container, we avoid this issue by allowing you to specify the user PUID and group PGID.

Ensure any volume directories on the host are owned by the same user you specify and any permissions issues will vanish like magic.

In this instance PUID=1000 and PGID=1000, to find yours use id your_user as below:

id your_user

Example output:

uid=1000(your_user) gid=1000(your_user) groups=1000(your_user)

Docker Mods

We publish various Docker Mods to enable additional functionality within the containers. The list of Mods available for this image (if any) as well as universal mods that can be applied to any one of our images can be accessed via the dynamic badges above.

Support Info

• Shell access whilst the container is running:

  docker exec -it rdesktop /bin/bash

• To monitor the logs of the container in realtime:

  docker logs -f rdesktop

• Container version number:

  docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "build_version" }}' rdesktop

• Image version number:

  docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "build_version" }}' lscr.io/linuxserver/rdesktop:latest

Updating Info

Most of our images are static, versioned, and require an image update and container recreation to update the app inside. With some exceptions (noted in the relevant readme.md), we do not recommend or support updating apps inside the container. Please consult the Application Setup section above to see if it is recommended for the image.

Below are the instructions for updating containers:

Via Docker Compose

• Update images:

  • All images:

    docker-compose pull

  • Single image:

    docker-compose pull rdesktop

• Update containers:

  • All containers:

    docker-compose up -d

  • Single container:

    docker-compose up -d rdesktop

• You can also remove the old dangling images:

  docker image prune

Via Docker Run

• Update the image:

  docker pull lscr.io/linuxserver/rdesktop:latest

• Stop the running container:

  docker stop rdesktop

• Delete the container:

  docker rm rdesktop

• Recreate a new container with the same docker run parameters as instructed above (if mapped correctly to a host folder, your /config folder and settings will be preserved)

• You can also remove the old dangling images:

  docker image prune

Image Update Notifications - Diun (Docker Image Update Notifier)

Tip

We recommend Diun for update notifications. Other tools that automatically update containers unattended are not recommended or supported.

Building locally

If you want to make local modifications to these images for development purposes or just to customize the logic:

git clone https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-rdesktop.git
cd docker-rdesktop
docker build \
  --no-cache \
  --pull \
  -t lscr.io/linuxserver/rdesktop:latest .

The ARM variants can be built on x86_64 hardware and vice versa using lscr.io/linuxserver/qemu-static

docker run --rm --privileged lscr.io/linuxserver/qemu-static --reset

Once registered you can define the dockerfile to use with -f Dockerfile.aarch64.

Versions

• 06.08.24: - Refresh all images using new bases, add Debian, bump Ubuntu to Noble.
• 27.05.24: - Rebase to Alpine 3.20 and Fedora 40.
• 17.01.24: - Sync webtop logic changes rebase to Alpine 3.19 and Fedora 39.
• 18.05.23: - Rebase all Alpine images to 3.18, deprecate armhf.
• 27.10.22: - Rebase all Ubuntu images to Jammy 22.04.
• 26.10.22: - Rebase Alpine xfce to 3.16, migrate to s6v3.
• 05.03.22: - Organize tags differently to run Ubuntu at latest LTS, make Alpine latest, add docs about GPU accel.
• 05.05.21: - Reduce default packages to their flavour specific basics.
• 05.04.21: - Add Alpine flavour.
• 06.04.20: - Start PulseAudio in images to support audio
• 28.02.20: - Initial Releases