I’ve long been accustomed to running headless gui remote servers (because the servers were generally not doing complex serving I generally set them up as fedora desktops then manually installed whatever services they needed). This has worked well for 20 or so years, despite me often being in a different continent to the server. Now, not so much.
The switch to Fedora 43 has completely screwed up x2go, my recent favourite - it seems almost impossible to get the screen resolution workable (even when it’s MATE to MATE, or gnome3 to gnome3). This is presumably related in some way to xwayland configuration. But that’s probably not worth pursuing very far, as any solution is likely to be temporary (i.e. I don’t imagine xwayland’s going to be around for long). So accepting wayland and using RDP seems the way to go.
Trouble is, I haven’t seen a single guide to how to set up the server for RDP that doesn’t require local access to the server. Every one I’ve come across blithely says ‘open x or y gui on the server’ (mostly for configuring security). But remote headless seems likely to be a common use-case. So is remote configuration for this purpose actually do-able? If so, can someone please give a pointer where to look for guidance?
Thank you Vladislav, much appreciated. Using the keywords from your note, I managed to track down your earlier, more detailed reply at Headless Remote Desktop setup process - Desktop - GNOME Discourse . That has finally worked - I spent ages tracking down that the key and cert locations seem to have changed between Fedora 40 and 43 so that authentication wasn’t working (who would have believed that the diagnostic “RDP the connection transport layer failed” could have so many potential causes). But anyway fixing that seems to have been the last stumbling block. I now can get a beautifully rendered screen from server to client, without any monitor on the server, under Gnome Connections (Remmina doesn’t seem to be so happy, but that’s a problem for another day - probably the one after the second coming). So having solved that last preliminary, it’s on to the primary motivators for it:
.setting up the server to supply btrbk services to my desktop (the client)
.setting up an httpd server to provide a permanent connection to the world for an arduino that I am configuring to control a water pump (don’t ask)