rdesktop

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rdesktop
Developed by	rdesktop team
Latest release	1.6.0 / May 10, 2008
OS	Unix-like
Genre	Microsoft Terminal Services client
License	GPL
Website	www.rdesktop.org

rdesktop is a free, open source client for Microsoft's proprietary RDP protocol. It is released under the GNU General Public License and is available on Unix-like systems such as BSD and Linux.

As of May 2008, rdesktop implements a large subset of the RDP 5 protocol, including:

Bitmap caching
File system, audio, serial port and printer port redirection
Mappings for most international keyboards
Stream compression and encryption
Automatic authentication
Smartcard support

rdesktop also has features with no direct analogue in the official Microsoft RDP client:

Single-application remoting (similar to the "application publishing" feature in Citrix)
A "seamless" mode (in which server-side windows are one-to-one mapped to X11 windows on the client)

Note: There are patches available to improve the "seamless" mode with connection sharing, allowing multiple remote applications to appear in this mode.

Still unimplemented are:

Remote Assistance requests (the protocol for which remains undocumented)
USB device redirection

Support for the additional features available in RDP 5.1 and RDP 6 (including multi-head display spanning) also have not yet been implemented.

rdesktop on Windows 95 connected to Windows NT 4.0

rdesktop on Mac OS X connected to Windows Server 2003

[edit] Use

rdesktop is commonly used on desktop Linux installations to connect to Microsoft Windows computers running Terminal Services, including Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Terminal Server, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. The program has also been integrated into several thin client Linux distributions and some thin client appliances.