In a previous post I enabled multiple remote desktop connections in a Windows XP Professional virtual machine. Since then I have installed Microsoft Office 2007 and RSSOwl so that I can access these applications from any of my computers.
With the release of Ubuntu 10.4 today I needed to configure rdesktop to connect to XP Pro.
The rdesktop program is quite configurable (it has many command line switches) but I only find myself needing to use a few. The available switches are viewable in the command line as follows:
Click Applications, then Accessories and then Terminal.
In the Terminal type rdesktop and then press Enter.
The Terminal will list and explain all of the available switches for the rdesktop application. To scroll up and down press the Shift key and the Page Up and Page Down keys.
The IP address of my XP Pro machine is 192.168.0.12, so to establish a full screen connection we just enter the following command into the terminal:
rdesktop -f 192.168.0.12
For bandwidth constrained connections use the following:
rdesktop -fP 192.168.0.12
To enable sound from the remote desktop add the following before the IP address:
-r sound:local
To avoid going in to the terminal every time we want to launch a remote desktop session we need to make a launcher as follows:
Right click the top panel on the screen and then click Add to Panel. Click Custom Application Launcher and then the Add button. Type a Name and the command line that you want to use then click Close.
The final screen-shot is the proof of the pudding! To toggle between full screen and window modes press Ctrl, Alt and Enter.
Source: Ubuntu Forums
Sandro
May 5, 2010 at 4:15 am
Excellent post!!! Thanks!!!
Mike
May 5, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Glad that you liked it Sandro! Thank-you!
Chris
May 15, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Just wanted to say thanks for this. It worked 100%!
Mike
May 16, 2010 at 7:29 am
Thanks Chris!
Prosper
July 3, 2010 at 9:43 am
Wow it is very nice I like it.
wenhui100
August 16, 2010 at 5:26 pm
wow …. got to try this …. its super helpful if this works
wenhui100
August 16, 2010 at 10:53 pm
thank you so much ….. now I could finally boot to ubuntu 10.04 and start loging in to my office multi session hacked windows xp … thank you soooo much …
Mike
August 17, 2010 at 7:44 am
You’re welcome Wenhui! Glad it is working for you
Hugo
November 18, 2010 at 12:51 pm
You can install ThinVNC in Windows XP and connect from Ubuntu or another operating system via browser.
I connect to my Windows desktop from Ubuntu and iPad. You can read an article in http://hugo-sanoguera.blogspot.com/2010/11/now-i-can-forget-about-logmein.html
Regards,
Hugo
Suresh
January 16, 2011 at 12:15 am
Thanks for the post. I’m using VMWare Player, installed Linux 10.10 32 bit. I’m connecting to my office desktop winserver 2008 using VPN and rdesktop. Everything works fine. To toggle full screen ctrl+Alt+Enter did not work as it is minimizing VMWare player.
For those who are connecting to rdesktop within linux hosted on VMWare they can use ctrl+Alt+Shift+Enter.
However in window mode remote desktop doesn’t show scrollbars… did anybody found any fix for this?
Thanks!