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Using Windows Terminal Services with Linux
Author: Rick Nicholas | Wednesday March 24, 2004
Accessing Windows Terminal Services through Linux is easier then you thought, and best of all, their is a free client available for you to use.
If you are like me and you prefer using Linux, but are forced to use Windows at the job for various tasks, then using Windows Terminal Services is a nice way of getting around the need to boot into Windows to do routine domain maintenance, run a certain application, etc. Luckily, its real easy to do, you don't need any Windows software, and its simple. How you may ask ?, rdesktop is the answer, here's the deal.
rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000/2003 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop. Unlike Citrix ICA, no server extensions are required.
rdesktop was initially written by Matthew Chapman based on various scarce documentation, wire sniffs, and trial-and-error. It is made available to the rest of us under the GNU Public Licence (GPL). So now you know a bit more about rdesktop, lets install it and see how it works !
Their are 2 ways you can obtain and install rdesktop, you can either install it using your package managment system (assuming your distro makes the package available), or you can install it from the sourceball. We'll cover both ways just in case, note that for installing packages from source it is assumed you have the required development tools loaded, we won't be covering that here. The machine being used for this tutorial is running Fedora Core 1 so you'll need to adjust the commands for your distro as needed.
Installation -
We'll cover using a package manager to install rdesktop first, if you are using Fedora like me its simple, just grab a term and become root as follows:
su
password
Cool, now we'll use Yum to install rdesktop for us, if you are not familiar with Yum, it is an excellent package management tool which comes with Fedora, you can view a tutorial on using Yum here. So, still in your terminal window issue the following command:
yum install rdesktop
Yum will do its thing and before you know it rdesktop is installed and ready to be used, now, if rdesktop is not available via your distribution's package management program, or if you just want to make sure you have the latest and greatest version of rdesktop, you can install it from the sourceball as follows. First, download the latest sourceball from the rdesktop site, at the time this tutorial was written the latest stable version was 1.3.1. Once downloaded go back to your terminal and still as root enter the following commands:
tar -zxf rdesktop-1.3.1.tar.gz
cd cd rdesktop-1.3.1
./configure
make
make install
Thats it, after make install finishes installing the package it is ready to be used.
Using rdesktop -
At this point using rdesktop can be as simple as pointing the program to an available box running Windows Terminal Services, such as:
rdesktop 192.168.1.10 &
This starts rdesktop, opens a terminal session on the machine indicated, and presents you with a Windows login screen awaiting your input. The & sign is not required, but frees up your terminal window for other purposes. That being said rdesktop has many options worth noting, so lets look at a couple. By default, when you start rdesktop it passes your *nix username to the terminal server, but what if your Windows login name is different ?, sure you can change it at the login screen or you can simply do the following:
rdesktop -u yourname 192.168.1.10 &
Using the -u option instructs rdesktop to send the username specified to the given server. Ok, now lets say you have the need to connect to a terminal server which only supports RDP Version 4, simple, just enter the following command:
rdesktop -4 192.168.1.10 &
rdesktop connects using RDP Version 4 just as you specified. rdesktop has many other options you can explore on your own, you can read about them via the man pages, or to see a quick list just enter the following command:
rdesktop
Thats it for this tutorial, hopefully you found it useful and can see what an excellent tool rdesktop is for us poor slobs that still have to deal with Windows. Good Luck !
Written by Rick Nicholas
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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