Completely UNINSTALL corrupted instance of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 is a comprehensive programming suite for app development on Windows platform. It can be good or evil when it comes to such an elephant build with additional packages and tools to be installed all at one time. It takes lot of space and requires attention while doing uninstallation. Any error generated during the uninstallation process could actually break the whole thing. You can repair it via the installation wizard before you can actually uninstall it.

When you land on this article, you might actually have left the installation in a broken state and you might have desparately searched through the Internet to find a resolution for all these. The thing is you just cannot uninstall VS2010 in a normal way. Indeed, Microsoft provide a better way for uninstallation in VS2012 or newer while we're still sticking to the 6 years old VS build.

Microsoft has released a tool to fix all kinds of registry errors or blocking issue during uninstallation of any program, i.e., any program which appears in the uninstall list.

URL:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17588/fix-problems-that-block-programs-from-being-installed-or-removed

It's a troubleshooting tool which guides you through to the right option which actually fixes those strange errors for you and uninstalls the program as specified from there. I have tried this tool and ultimately removed my broken VS build on Windows 2008 server. It claims to support Windows version from 7 to 10.

You may need to try a further cleanup by uninstalling those depending components of Visual Studio via Control Panel | Programs and Features.

Finally, it frees up huge amount of diskspace on the server.

XRDP Login with Black Screen issue

After trying a couple of things on the Linux server and found nothing wrong with the configuration of XRDP server, I was wondering what exactly caused this whereas I got used to login properly without any issue with RDP client on Mac OS X.

Is it something wrong with an update on Microsoft RDP client, or something deep inside my connection profile?

Just found this a reply on the forum which points me to the right direction.

According to the replies in the forum
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xrdp/forums/forum/389417/topic/4880098,
it looks like a problem in the domain settings in my connection profile which has been remembered since I connected to some other servers whereas a domain needs to be specified. In Preference, I simply cleared the field Domain and now my XRDP session can be connected again with no further issue.

Apart from the black screen, here's our login session window again!

The same thing may happen on Windows RDP client as well. So, please beware of the Domain when logging in XRDP next time.

XRDP via SSH session

To make use of Windows Remote Desktop Client to connect to Graphical X session on Ubuntu Linux server, there are three basic components that would help make a secured connection:

XRDP server

SSH server

VNC server

XRDP protocol would be used to forward VNC session to Windows RDC. For security reason, it will be done through the data encapsulation by using SSH tunnel.

The benefit is that it doesn't require the client to install VNC viewer and use standard Remote Desktop Client on Windows computer.

For better security, Putty will be used to create SSH connection first and do the port forwarding as follows:

For example:

Port 5555 (client port, any other port than 3389 or 3390) => localhost:3389 (remote server port)

On the server, Firewall rules restrict that only SSH port is open to the users for connection. Through SSH session, we can connect it with Windows RDC by using URI like:

localhost:5555

Before all these happen, we need to make sure that SSH server, VNC server and XRDP server are installed  and configured properly on Linux server.

Use the following commands to install all required servers:

$ sudo apt-get install openssh
$ sudo apt-get install vnc4server
$ sudo apt-get install xrdp

Just skipped SSH and VNC setup whereas you could find lots of references on the other forums.

For XRDP, we need to make a little adjustment on the file "/etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini" .

Depending on the setup of vnc4server, you need to define the VNC port to be forward by XRDP protocol. Under the section "xrdp1" in the file "xrdp.ini", please comment out the line of "port=-1" and add a working VNC port for use, i.e., port=5901.

[globals]
bitmap_cache=yes
bitmap_compression=yes
port=3389
crypt_level=low
channel_code=1

[xrdp1]
name=sesman-Xvnc
lib=libvnc.so
username=ask
password=ask
ip=127.0.0.1
#port=-1
port=5901

Then restart XRDP service:

$ sudo service xrdp restart

Now, it's time to test from the client side by initiating SSH connection using Putty client.

Then open Remote Desktop Client on Windows comptuer with the URI:

localhost: 5555

You should a GUI login screen for xrdp session. Using linux username and password, you can login to VNC session like what a VNC viewer normally does.

Enjoy your RDC!