Rdesktop

[Jenine Killebrew]

rdesktopis an implementation of a client software for Microsoft's proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Rdesktop is free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL-3.0-or-later), and is available for Linux and BSD as well as for Microsoft Windows.

As of August 2013, rdesktop implements a large subset of the RDP 5 protocol. Unlike Remote Desktop Connection in modern versions of Windows, rdesktop still supports the older RDP 4.0 protocol used by Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition and Windows 2000 Server.

Support for the additional features available in RDP 5.1 and RDP 6 (including multi-head display spanning, window composition and console connection) have not yet been implemented, although some have been officially documented on MSDN.[3][4]

Rdesktop is commonly used on desktop ReactOS and Linux installations to connect to Microsoft Windows running Remote Desktop Services. There are many GUI clients, like tsclient, Gnome-RDP and KDE Remote Desktop Connection (KRDC), which are graphical front-ends to rdesktop. The program has also been integrated into several thin client Linux distributions like Thinkstation and the PC TSC project, as well as some thin client appliances.[5]

hello,

Connecting to win 2003 server from my arch.

Just noticed i can't copy/paste anymore when using rdesktop (had 1.5.0, tried both 1.6.0 and cvs).

I copy something, and then want to paste it, nothing happens. Right click gives me grayed out paste options.

Works fine with windows rdp.

Asked a friend who alse has rdesktop (says 1.5.0) and for him it works fine.

So it obviously is something with my setup.

I could swear it worked fine before.

Regular -Syu user here

so god knows when this happend and what's the reason.

Anyone encountered similar issue?

gave me hope for a split second... but thats just the option to enable clipboard trasnmission between local and remote.

My problem is cimpletely with remote side. The clipboard doesn't work on remote side.

I'm helping a friend set up Remote Desktop Connection on Linux, so that he could connect to his PC at work. But he's not that familiar with Linux and I'm trying to help him out. I tried making the whole thing as simple as possible. I've set up a shortcut on the desktop, so all it takes is to double click on the rdesktop .desktop entry and all he'd have to enter is his password.

Everything worked fine on Linux Mint, but somehow doesn't in Lubuntu. You see, when on Linux Mint, the login window was centered, on Lubuntu, it's way off to the right (seen on the image below). And that means when he logs in to his remote desktop, all windows are off-screen too, so basically a percentage of window is lost on the right side of the screen.

I've also tried setting a particular resolution, so to see if it'd work in windowed mode, by removing the -f key and replacing it with -g 1680x1010 (actual resolution on monitor settings is 1680x1050, but I had to cut some height, because a tiny bit of the window would be cut off by taskbar), and that worked just fine, except... it's not full screen, and he'd like it to be full screen. I also tried to combine the -f and -g 1680x1010 switches, but the screen would still be off on full screen, everything leaning to right. I also tried setting it by percentage, -g 90%, and that didn't help either.

I hope you understood the problem here. Long story short is that I need to get Remote Desktop Connection working, as easy as possible - a double click on the desktop entry and it'd launch in full screen and all a user would do, is enter their password. He could probably live with windowed rdesktop as well, but if the same thing worked on Linux Mint, but doesn't on Lubuntu, I'm pretty sure, there's a way to get the whole thing working on Lubuntu too.

Ehh, apparently the solution was so simple. It looks like the resolution set from the Start-menu's "Monitor settings" does not actually set the resolution to the given value. Googling around, trying different keywords, I stumbled upon this tool, named xrandr. I'm not entirely sure what xrandr is capable of doing, but one of the features is that, you can set pretty much any resolution, using this command-line tool. So, here's how I fixed the anomaly I described in the original post.

And now when I tried launching rdesktop everything was neat, log-in screen centered and just how it's supposed to be. Although I got it fixed, I'm not sure, why "Monitor settings" does not change the actual resolution on my mate's computer. I tried on my Lubuntu as well, and it worked - when I changed the resolution in "Monitor settings", the current value in xrandr -q also changed.

Ehh, so much hassle with just getting a program full screened :D

For connecting to a Windows 7 virtual machine on a LAN, what would be the ideal settings to specify when using rdesktop in linux so that it feels as close as possible to using a regular Windows 7 machine? And is there anything I should configure on the Windows VM?

Works pretty solidly. I had to compile a newer rdesktop since the one that comes with my distro is a bit old. Pretty snappy. Still not as snappy as talking to XP, but markedly better than it is with no special options.

If you get a warning saying 24 bit color depth is not allowed, you will need to use the group policy edtor on the server machine to change the Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Terminal Services -> "Limit maximum color depth" setting. (see here)

I forgot to mention, on Windows XP, you will also need to add a DWORD value to your registry: AllowFontAntiAlias with value 1 at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp (source) and restart your machine.

The above also removed windows manager decorations and passes all keys (Ctrl+Alt+Del etc.) to the Windows machine. I have the resolution explicitly specified in place of using full screen mode on rdesktop to prevent it from taking over both monitors.

I am using rdesktop frequently to access my university PC from home via vpn.rdesktop is running smooth and without a problem, only the keymap is always wrong. My language setup is en_US, but my locale is de_DE.UTF-8.What should I do?

The answer from derwahre_tj is correct, but you do not need to download the package again.The keymaps files will be installed to /usr/share/rdesktop/keymaps when the rdesktop package is installed on your system. Instead of downloading the files again, simply copy the files from the system dir.

I am running ssh server -L 3392:192.168.1.138:3389 in one terminal window, then running rdesktop 127.0.0.1:3392 in another to connect to a Windows machine through an SSH tunnel. How can I merge this into one command that I can run from a Gnome shortcut or something?

I'm making an assumption here that rdesktop does not fork and return until the program ends. If it does, the SSH connection will die immediately. If that's true, you'd need to watch for running rdesktop processes, loop/sleep until they're all dead, and then close the SSH connection.

The above will tell ssh to run a sleep 5 on the remove server and go to the background (-f). This will make the connection stay open for 5 seconds, which is enough time for the rdesktop command to run. The port forwarding will remain in place whilst there is traffic passing through, so as as soon as you exit the rdesktop the ssh should die automatically.

Something like rdesktop would be perfect. I've tried getting it to run on windows, but I've run into problems. Even though I had XminG running as an xserver, it said it couldn't connect to the local display. Eventually I installed x/cygwin and compiled rdesktop myself, and that ended up working, but the sound still didn't work.

I regularly use rdesktop to login to Windows computers over the network from Linux. Doing this, I regularly need to share files. For most Windows versions, this works fine the normal way by just specifying -r disk:linux=DIRECTORY. However, some Windows versions including Windows 8.1 have a quirk that require audio to also be forwarded in order for disk forwarding to work. Odd, but it works.

A concrete example is the key kombination CTRL+ALT+LEFT and CTRL+ALT+RIGHT which I use on my local machine to switch between virtual desktops. The remote machine does not have any virtual desktops, and this key combination has no effect there. But the key strokes are "eaten" by the rdesktop window nevertheless.

But the link to the patch is apparently now broken from that thread. Thanksfully the author submitted the patch to the rdesktop project. The patch is available here, titled: #178 Send some hotkeys to local windows manager instead of remote.

In Gutsy and Hardy, I am able to connect to the server via RDP. Shortly (30sec-1min) after login, the connection freezes---the pointer still responds, but I am unable to see the results of any mouse clicks or keypresses. If I kill the client and reconnect, I see that the mouse clicks and keypresses were being sent to the remote server. There are no side-effects on other X applications---everything continues to work except for rdesktop.

This behavior was identical under Gutsy and on two different Hardy machines, regardless of network interface. I tried the Gutsy rdesktop package and also tried compiling the latest rdesktop cvs, all with the same results. However it worked fine under Dapper.

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