Hello again! > So the problem is neither xrdp nor the X server.
I'll concede that testing might be horribly broken at the moment, especially in the GTK3 department. But considering MATE, xfce4 and LXDE all work for local logins, but under xrdp 0.9 MATE and LXDE give an empty background and xrdp4 only works with some clients(!), xrdp has to be at least a part of the problem. My main gripe is that it doesn't behave very consistently. Sometimes sesman starts, sometimes it doesn't. On a fresh boot (w/ sesman running) I always get the behaviour above, but there were times (after trying different users, clients, desktop environments, local/xrdp logins), when it suddenly, magically started to work -- until the next sleep or reboot. Even then, connecting to a running session from another machine would not work. 0.9 also refuses to launch VNC sessions or connect to existing ones. Too many different problems to pin down the cause. > Anything else special about this setup? No. Plain vanilla stretch install, at least it was supposed to be. >> * Neither the VNC options nor "console" work at all anymore. > > Well, did you install the relevant packages, like a VNC server? The 0.6 setup was of course VNC based and I didn't uninstall them. The x11vnc configured to attach to the local X server's still running strong, xrdp just doesn't like it, it just disconnects after a successful login (lightdm login, not xrdp). >> * Going back to 0.6.1 doesn't help. > > Did you make sure to also recreate the old config files? No, but I didn't have to do anything special to get basic operation out of 0.6 either. FWIW, I've gotten 0.6 to work again. Looks like it has to be xfce for now (I'd only tried MATE before), but I can live with that. > Another thing: What PAM modules do you have enabled in common-session? > Anything non-default? No, bog standard. I'm sticking with 0.6 for now, but if you have any ideas or a version with much better logging, I'm perfectly willing to test it one weekend or other. Cheers, C.