rdesktop is an implementation of a client software for Microsoft's proprietary

Remote Desktop Protocol Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft which provides a user with a graphical interface to connect to another computer over a network connection. The user employs RDP client software for this purpose, while ...

(RDP). Rdesktop is

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

, subject to the requirements of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

(GPL-3.0-or-later), and is available for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

as well as for Microsoft Windows. As of August 2013, rdesktop implements a large subset of the RDP 5 protocol. Unlike

Remote Desktop Connection Remote Desktop Services (RDS), known as Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 and earlier, is one of the components of Microsoft Windows that allow a user to initiate and control an interactive session on a remote computer or virtual machin ...

in modern versions of Windows, rdesktop still supports the older RDP 4.0 protocol used by Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition and Windows 2000 Server.

Feature set

RDP5 features supported: * Bitmap caching * File system, audio, serial port and printer port redirection * Mappings for most international keyboards * Stream compression and encryption * Automatic authentication * Smartcard support * RemoteApp like support called "seamless" mode via SeamlessRDP *

Network Level Authentication Network Level Authentication (NLA) is a feature of Remote Desktop Services (RDP Server) or Remote Desktop Connection (RDP Client) that requires the connecting user to authenticate themselves before a session is established with the server. Origin ...

Still unimplemented are: * Client redirection upon reconnect (of disconnected session) * Remote Assistance requests * USB device redirection Support for the additional features available in RDP 5.1 and RDP 6 (including multi-head display spanning, window composition and console connection) have not yet been implemented, although some have been officially documented on

MSDN Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

.See for example

some documents of RDP 6.0

Use

Rdesktop is commonly used on desktop

ReactOS ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system for amd64/ i686 personal computers intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Windows. ReactOS has been noted ...

and Linux installations to connect to Microsoft Windows running

Remote Desktop Services Remote Desktop Services (RDS), known as Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 and earlier, is one of the components of Microsoft Windows that allow a user to initiate and control an interactive session on a remote computer or virtual machin ...

. There are many GUI clients, like tsclient, Gnome-RDP and KDE Remote Desktop Connection (KRDC), which are graphical front-ends to rdesktop. The program has also been integrated into several

thin client In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as ''network computers'', or in ...

Linux distributions like Thinstation and the PC TSC project, as well as some thin client appliances.

References

{{More citations needed, article, date=August 2008

External links

rdesktop websiteKRDC
- KDE Remote Desktop Connection
Gnome-RDP
- GNOME front-end for rdesktop
xrdp
- RDP server for Unix, based on rdesktop
CoRD
- A native Cocoa interface for the OS X port of rdesktop.
properJavaRDP
- rdesktop-based Free Java Remote Desktop Connection Client
Rdesktop-Win32
- Win32 build of rdesktop Free network-related software Free software programmed in C Thin clients Remote desktop software for Linux

Feature set

Use

See also

References

External links