Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Connecting to a Windows machine via RDP from GNU/Linux

For a while I used a program called Terminal Server Client (tsclient), a frontend for rdesktop, to connect to Windows machines from GNU/Linux using native Windows RDP. While it worked, it wasn't the greatest. For one, it seemed that in order to save my connection settings, I had to save a separate .rdp file for every server. And then if I wanted to connect to another server with its saved settings, I'd have to open the .rdp file for that machine. pretty annoying. In addition, when I would log out of the remote server, tsclient would present a popup saying that the connection was terminated, and after 30 seconds try to reconnect. Neither issue was a big deal, but it was kind of irritating. I confess that I never even looked for a solution to either one, so they both may have been easily solvable.

But now it doesn't matter, because I just stumbled upon a new RDP client called Remmina, thanks to this post. Remmina is quite nice, and solves both of the main issues I had with tsclient. Perhaps it will present some issues of its own, but so far, it's won me over.

I'm sure it's available in the repositories for most distributions. At the moment I'm using Ubuntu, and so to install it, I ran this in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install remmina

Here's a screenshot:

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