RDP connection to Linux

Going down one rabbit hole or another last night, I somewhat randomly found an article detailing how to install and access a graphical desktop UI on the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The gist of it is

  1. Update your packages.
  2. Install the xfce4 package and optionally, xfce4-goodies (one imagines this would work for other desktops as well)
  3. Install xrdp
  4. Change the port (the default RDP port is used for connecting to the shell)
  5. Start xrdp
  6. Launch an RDP to localhost, using the new port number.

It’s a neat trick, but I’m not sure how much use I have for it. Most of what I do with WSL (e.g. running various Linux utilities) is command-line oriented. A GUI just adds extra steps. Plus, because of the way WSL works, you have to restart xrdp any time you restart Windows. That’s already a nuisance with XAMPP.

But that one step, installing xrdp. I might have a use case for that. I keep a couple Linux VMs around for things where I do want a GUI, and it’s also a nuisance having to launch the Hyper-V manager in order to connect. If I could just leave the VM running in the background and RDP to it as needed…. that would be helpful.

FR, Gridview, and puns

I follow @Cassidoo on Twitter and spotted this thread she started.

I know a few folks who think puns are for children and not groan adults, but me, I’ve always enjoyed a good play on words. She continues on for a few more tweets, all playing off CSS units of measurement, and other people chimed in with their own.

As I said, I like a good play on words, but one thing was bothering me, “What’s this ‘fr’ thing?” One Google search later, I now know it’s a unit of measure meaning, to use an automatically calculated fraction of the space in a container. It’s used in grids and flexboxes and solves some problems where you accidentally use more than 100% of the available space.

You can read about it in the spec, but I found this introduction to the fr CSS unit to be quite helpful.

I do believe, I may have a few dozen uses for this. ?