With the Informatics Remote Desktop service, you can get a graphical login to DICE Linux. You can use it from anywhere, on any device which has RDP client software.
You connect to a DICE remote desktop server. If you're a staff member or research postgrad with your own DICE desktop computer, you can connect to that instead.

If you just need a text-only login, use ssh instead.

Limitations

Power

The remote desktop servers aren't powerful enough to run processes which need a lot of memory, processing power or time - at least, not for many people at once. Please run these on the compute servers or on a DICE desktop computer in the Informatics computing labs.

Software

Some software is deliberately not installed on them, including Chrome, VirtualBox, QEMU, VS Code, and MATLAB. To use these in a remote desktop session, login (using ssh in a terminal window) to a compute server, a student lab desktop computer, or your own DICE desktop computer (some staff members and research postgrads have one), and run it there.

How to get started with remote desktop

First, configure your device. These pages tell you how to do that:

You may need a VPN

Second, you may need a VPN. (It depends on where you are on the network, and on which computer you're trying to connect to.)
There are two VPNs you can use - the University's VPN or the School of Informatics VPN.

If you are on an Edinburgh University network

If your computer is in the University, for instance on eduroam wifi, you can connect to a DICE remote desktop server without using a VPN.

If you have a DICE computer of your own which you want to connect to, then you may need to use the School of Informatics VPN, or your access will be blocked by a firewall.

If you are connecting from home

If you are outside the Edinburgh University network - at home for instance - then you MUST use a VPN, either the University's VPN or the School's VPN. If you don't, your access will be blocked by a firewall.

To connect to your own DICE computer (if you have one) you will need to use the School of Informatics VPN, or your access will be blocked by a firewall.

Which host to connect to?

  1. All Users: Your remote desktop hostname is your DICE username followed by .remote.inf.ed.ac.uk. For example, if your username was s1234567 then your remote host's name would be s1234567.remote.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  2. Staff: Staff can also use a remote desktop server called staff.xrdp.inf.ed.ac.uk.
  3. Office desktop owners: If you have a personal DICE computer (many staff and research postgrads have this), you can use it as a remote desktop server. In this case you should bear two things in mind:
    • The hostname to connect to will be your DICE computer's name followed by .inf.ed.ac.uk.
    • You will need to use ⇒ The School of Informatics OpenVPN service. If you don't, your access will be blocked by a firewall.

How to logout

When you have finished, please logout of your session - here's how:

To ensure the load on the service does not become too high, sessions left idle for more than two days are terminated automatically. If you have access to a DICE desktop machine you can connect to that instead, and the timeout there is two weeks. Note that to access a DICE desktop machine you need to be on the Informatics network (using our OpenVPN service).

FAQ

Share your screen (in a scheduled lab session)
See Chrome remote desktop.
Desktop Environment
The remote desktop service only supports the MATE desktop environment. To ensure a good quality of service, selecting an alternative desktop environment is not supported.
Copy/Paste Support
The standard copy/paste functionality (supported in most applications through menus or by using Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v, Ctrl-x) should work reliably between remote and local environments. The traditional Unix style of highlighting text to copy and pasting by middle-button mouse click does NOT work.
Audio
There is no support for forwarding audio from the remote session to the local client.
Keyboard mapping problem
You may get a US keyboard layout when you login - meaning that characters such as £, ~, |, > are on the wrong keys or aren't present. If you have the wrong keyboard layout then the following command, when run in a terminal window in your RDP DICE session, should fix things: setxkbmap gb.
Login problems (password characters)
The keyboard mapping problem (above) means that people with non-alphanumeric characters in their DICE password may not be able to login, because their keyboard isn't sending the symbols they expect. We're looking for a solution to this problem.
Login problems (don't change your shell)
If you put an entry into your (DICE) bash startup file to start up your favourite shell instead of bash, then you won't be able to start a DICE remote desktop session! You can only use DICE remote desktop with bash. It's the only shell we can support.
Mate panel disappears
If the Mate panel disappears, it can be reset by pressing the following keys together Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal. In the terminal type mate-panel --reset . If this returns errors relating to dconf access, just move that out of the way with mv ~/.config/dconf/ ~/.config/dconf.bak and run the mate panel reset command again.
Slow response
In some clients, such as Windows App / Microsoft Remote Desktop, you can edit a connection's configuration to change options. For example, the Color Quality can be lowered to 16 bit. If your remote desktop is not reactive enough, you can experiment with these to find suitable settings.

Last reviewed: 
07/03/2023