Ogon Seamless mode

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Greetings All,

I have recently come across Ogon from Armin over at the FreeRDP project who as answered a few questions that I had related to that aspect regarding a project that I am piecing together.

On that note, I first tried to compile Ogon according to the build steps for my native Ubuntu 18.04 but did not have success with the Ogon backed for some reason although I do attribute that to my Ubuntu 18.04 have some important paths messed up somewhere.  Because of that, I decided to re-try to compile Ogon in a fresh Debian "stretch" version under VirtualBox and everything compiled perfectly and without any problems so I am very happy about that part.

Now that I am able to compile up Ogon, I need to figure out how to allow a FreeRDP client side to connect and run an application in seamless mode.

My understanding is that you can connect to a Windows box with xfreerdp and give a command to run, for example notepad.exe or some other application in seamless mode, but I also need to be able to do this on when I connect to the Ogon RDP server on a Linux box as well.

Can Ogon run applications in seamless mode via an FreeRDP client, and if so, and you please give me an example line that I could test out?

Thanks so much and have a great day,

Lonnie

[brian mullan]

Lonnie

First, I am not with the ogon project and this is not specifically about ogon so I hope its ok posting it here as I've not yet tried executing a remoteapp using ogon.

I use Ubuntu linux but have used xfreerdp (freerdp) for a long time and have used it to run 1 specific windows app (a mindmap program) as a "remoteapp" from a KVM VM that I still use today

I wanted to let you know one tip that I found out several years ago.

On Windows .. the "explorer" application has 1 special property.   

If you execute "explorer" with freerdp as your remoteapp it will appear in its own Linux "window" like any other Linux application.

You can resize it, minimize/maximize it etc.

BUT... unlike running any other Windows application as a "remoteapp"... you can use "explorer" when run as a "remoteapp" to find & click on any other Windows application Icon on your Windows VM or remote Windows system

and that Windows application "inherits" the "remoteapp" capability of "explorer".

So what I did on my Windows systems is create a directory I called "win-apps".

In the "win-apps" directory I created Windows Desktop "launcher" icons for all the other Windows programs I might ever want to run as RemoteApps.

Then I execute a command line like the following example on my Linux system.

Lets assume my Windows 7 enterprise/ultimate IP address is 192.168.122.55

$ xfreerdp /cert-ignore /u:bmullan /p:my_pwd /drive:shared-folder,/home/bmullan/shared-folder +clipboard /sound:sys:alsa /app:'%windir%\explorer.exe' /v:192.168.122.55

If I then use explorer to browse into the "win-apps" directory I can click on ANY of those launcher Icon's and they all start in their own Linux application window and look/act

just like any other Linux application !

NOTE:  

I have previously created a directory /home/bmullan/shared-folder and this command maps that folder as a shared drive into the Windows 7 so I see it in explorer and can copy files to/from it and my linux system

/drive:shared-folder,/home/bmullan/shared-folder

The following cmd line option enables clipboard copy/paste between Windows apps and Linux apps (except for graphics).

+clipboard

The following enables "sound/audio" between the Windows apps and Linux:

/sound:sys:alsa

And this cmd line option is what executes Windows Explorer as a "remoteapp"

/app:'%windir%\explorer.exe'

Brian

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hi Brian,

Thanks so much for replying to my inquiry and the Windows information that you have given me will be extremely useful for the Windows side of things. Actually, I am going to give it a try today, or tomorrow as it sounds like a great approach.

I would like to settle in on using the RDP protocol for all of the platforms to be consistent and make things easier in the long run so my hope is that there will be a way to use OGON to provide the server side functionality just like Windows provides in the approach that you mentioned so that I can also call Linux (Debian, or Ubuntu mostly) applications that are in VM's and have the too show up on the local desktop.

Will keep you posted if I hear something back in this area as well.

Cheers

Lonnie

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[Bernhard Miklautz]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 05:22:11AM -0400, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Can Ogon run applications in seamless mode via an FreeRDP client, and if
> so, and you please give me an example line that I could test out?

you can run any single application within you xsession. It's also
possible to launch a single Qt application directly (so is done with the
greeter). However a real seamless mode - the remote app RDP channel
(RAILs) isn't implemented. So you always will get a 'desktop' session.

Best regards,
Bernhard

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hello Bernhard,

Thanks for responding to my inquiry.

I really like what I have seen in OGON as for being an RDP server on Linux that allows for users to login and get full desktops.  Just out of curiosity, what would it take to have OGON support seamless mode for Linux applications over an RDP channel using FreeRDP?  

About the only other close project that can do something like this, but not using RDP is the Xpra (https://xpra.org/) project. Of course it can be done with xsession, but I also did not know about how a QT application could do it as well.

Additionally there is NX from Nomachine that has their own protocol as well as VNC that generally does not support seamless mode except for a a very of and discontinued version called MetaVNC, but I was hoping handle all of the Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX stuff via RDP through FreeRDP since I really like it and it fits in well with my project.  The FreeRDP (OGON) is part of the project that deals with allowing the users to have remote cloud access to their systems but the remaining part has to do with platform independence for an OS.

 

Looks like I might have to make some adjustments to that plan for the moment.

Best Regards,

Lonnie

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hi Brian,

Hope that your day is going well.

I just tried the command line that you showed me, but get errors:

xfreerdp /cert-ignore /u:test /p:1q2w3e4r +clipboard /sound:sys:alsa /app:'%\windows%\explorer.exe' /v:10.0.0.46

[15:29:59:945] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.client.common.cmdline] - loading channelEx rdpdr
[15:29:59:945] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.client.common.cmdline] - loading channelEx rdpsnd
[15:29:59:945] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.client.common.cmdline] - loading channelEx cliprdr
[15:29:59:945] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.client.common.cmdline] - loading channelEx rail
[15:29:59:971] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.client.x11] - Logon Error Info SESSION_ID [UNKNOWN]
[15:29:59:971] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.client.x11] - Logon Error Info SESSION_ID [UNKNOWN]
[15:29:59:971] [7973:7974] [INFO][com.freerdp.core] - ERRINFO_LOGOFF_BY_USER (0x0000000C):The disconnection was initiated by the user logging off their session on the server.

I tested it on a Windows 7 Pro.

The strange thing is that if I leave out the

 /app:'%\windows%\explorer.exe'

part then it connects just fine but I get the whole desktop.

Very strange

Cheers

Lonnie

On Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 9:35 AM brian mullan <bmulla...@gmail.com> wrote:

[brian mullan]

Hi Lonnie

Yes Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate ordinarily can't do RemoteApps.   But there are at least 2 tools out there that can enable that for you.

Kim Knight's RemoteAppTool is one:  http://www.kimknight.net/remoteapptool.

You would have to download it for Windows 7 then run it and configure the application you want to be able to call as a RemoteApp (in my case I use Exlorerer)

Sorry for not mentioning that.

Brian

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[Lonnie Cumberland]

No worries and Thanks for getting back to me.

I just looked and the RemoreApp tool will not work for Windows 7 Pro.

I did come across "seamlessrdp" (https://github.com/rdesktop/seamlessrdp) but that one is so outdated that it will not work either.

Thanks again and have a good weekend

Lonnie

[brian mullan]

Sorry my bad.  I'd forgotten which version of Windows I used myself.

I use RemoteAppTool on a Windows Ultimate installed as a Windows KVM VM on my Ubuntu systems so I can execute the windows Explorer and

have it appear in its own application window on my Ubuntu Desktop.   Then as I mentioned in the earlier email I just click on the Windows Launcher Icon

for my Windows Mindmap program and it appears in its own Linux X-window as well.

brian

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[Bernhard Miklautz]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 08:26:52AM -0400, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Just out of
> curiosity, what would it take to have OGON support seamless mode for Linux
> applications over an RDP channel using FreeRDP?

from the RDP protocol (the remote app channel) it's not a big deal but
detecting the Window movement, input handling, window positioning is a
major effort (and that needs to be done for each backend). So if having a XSession with a single Application isn't
enough it's quite some work (and not planned for the near future).

> Additionally there is NX from Nomachine that has their own protocol as well
> as VNC that generally does not support seamless mode except for a a very of
> and discontinued version called MetaVNC, but I was hoping handle all of the
> Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX stuff via RDP through FreeRDP since I really
> like it and it fits in well with my project.

Did you have a look to https://wiki.x2go.org? It's based on a fork of
the nxlibs (if I remember correctly).

Best regards,
Bernhard

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hi Bernhard,

Thanks for getting back to me.

For one part of the project, I will need OGON as it currently stands and then for another part, I will need to investigate x2go, Xpra, etc.. to handle the seamless stuff.

Best Regards,

Lonnie