Yesterday’s night I installed a test machine to play with KVM and some other stuff, obviously the OS of choice is the trusty CentOS.
I did a pretty minimal net-install but decided to install gnome desktop environment anyway because why not, not that it will be of much use, but still.
Anyway, since the machine is an headless server it’s mandatory to be able to control it remotely, like the past 2 or 3 times, I installed XRDP expecting everything will be fine and working without any problem.
And here is when I was wrong.
It’s been quite a long time since the last time I installed XRDP somewhere, but I clearly remember it working flawless without any kind of manual configuration.
I did the usual yum install xrdp, confirm the installation, bla bla bla, service xrdp start and both sesman and xrdp started with no problem.
Then, when I went back to my workstation (Fedora 18 x64) and tried to connect to the server using Remmina Remote Desktop Client at first it seems to be working but once I typed user ID, password and press OK I got prompted the following error:

connecting to sesman ip 127.0.0.1 port 3350
sesman connect ok
sending login info to sesman
login successful for display 10
started connecting
connecting to 127.0.0.1 5910
error - problem connecting

Giving a look at the xrdp-sesman.log file (in /var/log/) it looks like it’s not an authentication issue but some kind of misconfiguration/missing_component-s.
Results on duckduckgo.com aren’t of much help, the usually suggested workaround is uninstall that, that, and this, reinstall everything and XRDP will magically start working…not a great deal IMHO.
At least in my case the solution was simple, the inability to prompt a remote X session was caused by a missing component: tigervnc-server.
tigervnc-server appears to not be included in the XRDP dependencies list, manually installing it (before or after XRDP installation is the same) will solve every issue.