I've been struggling with this for a few days. Currently using Ubuntu 14.04. I started out trying to use VNC and could connect but only received a black and white checkered screen when connecting using tightvnc from my windows machine. Seems that applications seem to have issues interpreting the gnome graphics. I then tried XRDP and received the same issue but was able to find enough information to get by this issue. After creating a .xsession file and setting the desktop to spawn an xfce4-session I was able to connect and the desktop displays, at least for a few seconds. After a couple seconds rdp crashes and I'm unable to connect again until I restart the xrdp service. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks