Bug#776746: gnome-session: GNOME crashes during a remote desktop access

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 13 Mar 2015 at 16:10:18 +0000, GGaotx wrote:
> But both CentOS 7 with GNOME 3.8, Fedora 20 with GNOME 3.10 and Fedora 21 
> with GNOME 3.14 tell us that GNOME 3 itself can work well with xrdp without 
> any issues and this is a Debian ONLY bug. You can try them as well. And maybe
> you can find the difference of xrdp between Debian and those Red Hat based
> OS and find how they overcome this issue.

Fedora's xrdp appears to depend on tigervnc, which uses code from a modern
X server which presumably has the Composite extension. Unfortunately,
tigervnc is not yet available in Debian: <https://bugs.debian.org/650394>.

Debian's available VNC servers are:

* vnc4server, which uses code from XFree86 4.3.0 from 2003, itself based on
  X11R6.6 from 2001
* tightvncserver, which uses code from XFree86 3.3.2, based on X11R6.3
  from 1996

According to Wikipedia, the Composite extension dates from X11R6.8,
released in 2004; so it is not really surprising that neither of those
VNC servers support it, but it is also not really surprising that
the GNOME developers consider it to be an uncontroversial requirement
(after all, it's more than a decade old).

This is all very unfortunate, but I don't see any way it can change
for Debian 8, and I don't think it should be considered a release-critical
bug in GNOME. Perhaps (with your help?) tigervnc can be in Debian 9 and
we can have a standalone VNC server based on an Xserver less than a
decade old...

    S