xrdp changing PATH environment variable

Solution 1:

I'm not sure if this will solve your issue, since it impacts Ubuntu with XRDP and XFCE4. Still, there is a chance it does, so let's see.

I was facing a similar problem: the PATH environment variable was different when I logged into the machine through SSH and through XRDP. Concretely, when I opened a Terminal window in XRDP (xterm), the PATH variable was not set with local user paths (~/bin, ~/.local/bin, etc).

However, these paths were present when I logged in through SSH.

The problem was not in XRDP, but in how the Bash session is created with XTerm and with SSH. Since SSH creates a login session, the loaded files included /etc/environment and ~/.profile. In the latter, the paths I required were included.

This was not the case with XTerm. It creates a non-login bash session, and thus it loads /etc/bash.bashrc and ~/.bashrc.

The way I could fix it was simply to include the PATH initialization line from ~/.profile into one of these two files. Since I wanted this to impact all the users in the machine, I included it into /etc/bash.bashrc:

echo PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" >> /etc/bash.bashrc

You can find more information about how works in man bash