Can't get a connection to Gnome Remote Desktop

Desktop
1

I’ve recently installed gnome onto a headless debian 12 server at my home. I also enabled Gnome remote desktop by temporarily hooking up a monitor and setting it up through the GUI. I also needed to delete the /etc/network/interfaces file to get networking working again after installing Gnome. At this point, all seems to be working well - except that I can’t actually get connected from RDC in Windows (or anything else) to gnome remote desktop on the server. I’m not getting anything returned with sudo ss -tulwn | grep 3389 (according to this netstat should be returning something on 3389, but since netstat is deprecated I’m using ss instead - I think this shows the problem but not sure what to do about it, xrdp isn’t and never was installed so the solution there isn’t helping) and also getting WARNING: TCP connect to (192.168.1.103 : 3389) failed with Test-NetConnection -ComputerName 192.168.1.103 -Port 3389 from Windows.

I’m getting this response from systemctl --user status gnome-remote-desktop.service

● gnome-remote-desktop.service - GNOME Remote Desktop
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/gnome-remote-desktop.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Fri 2025-10-03 13:17:37 CDT; 4s ago
Main PID: 240892 (gnome-remote-de)
Tasks: 5 (limit: 57326)
Memory: 5.3M
CPU: 82ms
CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/gnome-remote-desktop.service
└─240892 /usr/libexec/gnome-remote-desktop-daemon

Oct 03 13:17:37 frigate systemd[235386]: Starting gnome-remote-desktop.service - GNOME Remote Desktop…
Oct 03 13:17:37 frigate systemd[235386]: Started gnome-remote-desktop.service - GNOME Remote Desktop.

Any ideas on what I’m missing here? Thanks!

3

Debian 12 shipped with GNOME 43; please use a more recent version of Debian to get up to date packages. There have been too many changes in the remote desktop support between GNOME 43 and GNOME 49 (the current stable version).

4

Thanks! I’ve got Debian 13 installed now and everything updated. Still not getting a response when I try to remote into the machine though.

robert@frigate:/etc/apt/sources.list.d$ sudo systemctl status gnome-remote-desktop
○ gnome-remote-desktop.service - GNOME Remote Desktop
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/gnome-remote-desktop.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)

5

I’m having trouble translating that to Debian. For example winpr-makecert doesn’t seem to be located when I try to install it.

I don’t have much on the server, I’m thinking the easiest way for me to get past this might be to just rebuild it on Ubuntu instead of Debian. I’ve never had any issues getting it working in Ubuntu.

7

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