I have Kubuntu 15.04 and using KDE Plasma 5.2.2 as the Desktop on a Hyper-V virtual machine running on my Surface Pro 3 with Windows 8.1. I have installed the latest version of XRDP installed (0.6.1-2) and tried to connect to my Kubuntu VM using Windows Remote Desktop Connection. I am able to connect and I get the standard XRDP login screen and was able to successfully login. However, all I get is a finely white/black checkered screen and cannot load the desktop.

Any ideas on how I can get this to work?

Is Kubuntu 15.04 and KDE Plasma 5.2.2 even compatible with XRDP anymore?

I was able to get this to work with Kubuntu 14.10.

a) try to suspend the compositor (if running at all) "SHIFT+Alt+F12"
b) do you only have a problem with "the desktop" or the entire session, ie. can you eg. see/interact with an xterm window (when starting one, eg. via ssh)

If "white/black checkered" refers to the standard X11 root window look (sort of a dense patter, see eg. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... System.png) that means "there is no desktop window" ie. plasmashell crashed - ideally some crash dialog would show up in this case.

What is happening is that I can connect to a session using Windows Remote Desktop Connection, and then I get an XRDP login dialog prompting me for my username, password, and port. After entering my username and password, a small window pops up in the upper left corner showing me the status of my login and loading of the session. All of that is successful. Then, when it is supposed to show the KDE Plasma splash screen, all I get is a grey screen and nothing else displays,

I will try to disable the compositor. I'm not at my computer right now, so I will try it out in the morning.

If you can think of anything else, let me know.

This is the same behavior when trying to connect to the Unity desktop in the current version 14.04 of Ubuntu. It has been reported that the Unity desktop is not compatible with XRDP due to the way Unity has been implemented.

Have you been able to connect remotely to Kubuntu 15.04 with the KDE Plasma 5 desktop using Windows RDC?

Unity is (was?) implemented as a compiz plugin - since compiz is an OpenGL compositor RDC could stumble across
- compositing
- opengl
- qt5
- qtquick

The default plasma splashscreen as well as plasmashell is meanwhile implemented in QtQuick/Qt5 - so either this is really a problem or it's indeed "just" compositing.

No Windows nor RDC here - sorry.

I disabled the compositor through the System Settings/Display and Monitor/Compositor module, but I'm still experiencing the same thing. Is that all I have to do to completely turn off/disable the compositor?

Any other ideas?

In theory - yes. (Let's assume it's off)

Let's see whether skipping the splashscreen makes any progress (ideally your session would autostart something very simple, like xterm, to see whether you ultimately logged in at some point and just the entire QtQuick stuff doesn't work)

Workspace Theme / Splash Screen => "None"

I set the Splash screen setting to None and I'm still not able to view the Kubuntu 15.04 KDE 5.2.2 session. I get the XRDP login dialog and then it shows the progress of the login and connection, and then I just get a grey screen and it goes no further.

Any other ideas on how to fix this and get it to work with XRDP and Windows RDC?

Since it looks like the KDE Plasma 5 desktop is crashing when I attempt to connect through Windows RDC, where do I go to figure out what is causing the crash? Is there a log file I can view?

> KDE Plasma 5 desktop is crashing
"KDE Plasma 5 desktop" doesn't exist - the desktop environment is formed by several processes.

If however a KDE process segfaults, a DrKonqi window is spawned, containing the backtrace.

=> To know what happens there, I'd suggest to login via ssh and check what processes are running. If eg. "plasmashell" or "kwin_x11" or "kded5" are *not*, try to run one of them (eg. plasmashell, the "desktop" in terms of "wallpaper and panels") and see whether that succeeds (don't forget to "export DISPLAY=:0")
If the startup fails (segfaults) you could run the process in gdb to obtain a backtrace (because for whatever reason kcrash/drkonqi doesn't kick in or at least -maybe "as well"- fails to create a window)