Everyone knows the trick where you use a virtual machine with a windows install on it to remote desktop into a remote computer. The problem with this is that you’re putting yet another layer of virtualization between yourself and where you want to be working.

Fortunately, good people like Matthew Chapman over at www.rdesktop.org started working on a way natively remote desktop into a windows box from a linux box.

It’s a command line tool which actually seems to work faster than the native windows remote desktop client. If you’re a stickler for speed but not for graphics this is the way to go.

Say you want to connect to a remote windows machine with an IP of 192.168.100.216 on the GOIT domain with a username of expertuser and a password of ilikewellencryptedpasswords.

You’d then open a terminal and use the following command:

rdesktop -f -uexpertuser -pilikewellencryptedpasswords -dGOIT 192.168.100.216

Most people don’t bother with domains so you can skip that part. The -f is the command to start in full screen mode. Pressing ctrl+alt+enter toggles back and forth between windowed and full screen mode.

If you get a “command not found”, run apt-get, apptitude or some other package manager to install it, then try the command again.

eg.

sudo apt-get install rdesktop

If you don’t have a package manager, go to the site and install install it by hand. But I must say, if you don’t have a package manager like apt-get you’re really missing out.

In the somewhat overloaded figure below you can see:

• My Ubuntu desktop
• My remote windows machine running IE and looking at an excellent website
• That I put a custom application launcher for the remote desktop onto my panel
• How to setup the properties for that launcher to make it work

More on custom application launchers later.

The only problem I’ve had so far is that if the remote machine goes into powersave mode, then there is no way to wake the machine back up again and the client stalls. This is why I have force quit and a quick launch app setup. It doesn’t happen as long as you’re using it, but if you step away you’ll find you have to restart. Fortunately it’s very quick.

Until next time, Happy Remoting!

Response to comments

Hey all you diggers! How goes? Thanks for testing the crap out of our servers! It seems like there’s a lot of commentary to get to (not just here, but on digg), I’m going to see if I can’t incorporate most of your questions/suggestions/horrifying abuse into future articles. Look for it in the next few days. Also … that pesky coldfusion error seems to have been fixed,

To foofightrs777 … there’s a bit of an Ubuntu buzz on digg now, do a search for Ubuntu bible, it’ll cover things like ssh servers on Windows … I’m going to take a look at it and if it doesn’t seem straightforward enough, I will write something up for you.

To leeDav … you hit it right on the money. This is not for the super advanced uber-nerds. Most of the linux/ubuntu stuff on this site will be geared for people who are just coming off of windows and sometimes a little hand holding is just what the doctor ordered.

To Phill … you’re right, it is an easy fix on the windows side of things to get it to power back up and I will get Ivan to include that when he writes the article on setting up terminal services. In this case I used a work around because I didn’t have admin access on the remote machine (just like you probably won’t when you are logging into your office machines, unless you’re the admin of course.)

To James … web interface you say? Looks like Microsoft has been innovating again. Well at least they’re putting good stuff into Vista. As a side note, your site breaks in such a way that I can’t read some of the lines. CSS issue on Firefox, I think.

Tags | Linux, Ubuntu