Hello everyone, I go to college at Penn State but I want to remote connect to Penn State Behrends computers. They have the address and everything, i just have to enter my username/password. It works fine when i did Remote Desktop connection with windows xp home, but i was wondering if linux was able to do this? (remote desktop connection to a windows machine). The reeason i want to do this is because of the software they have on their machines i can use for free. Thanks.

Linux uses a program called rdesktop. It should be installed already on your system (I'm assuming you are using Mandriva Powerpack 2006?), if not, it's part of the cd pack. Just urpmi rdesktop to install.

Mandriva also has a gui frontend under Internet->Remote Access, called Virtual Desktop. Once you use rdesktop, you'll never want to use the Remote Terminal Server that comes with XP. At one of my jobs, I had to manage multiple XP systems. I installed a Linux system, and dedicated one desktop to rdesktop for each machine, and stll had a separate desktop for each of my email & web browser apps.

Thanks Grue, I tried to find rdesktop in the many packages on the DVD and yes ihave 2006 powerpack dvd, but it coudln't find it. Under Internet/Remote Accesss/Virtual Network connection. And the name of the program is Rfbdrake 1.0 is this what your talking about?

Hmm. I have the Mandriva 2006 Free edition here, and it has rdesktop-1.4.1-1mdk.i586.rpm . Are you using the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Mandriva? From the rpm info: rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop.

Rfbdrake is used to setup a remote frame buffer with another linux system using vncviewer on the client side, and x0rfbserver on the server side.

If you can't find it on the cd's, go to easyurpmi.zarb.org, and follow their instructions to setup your urpmi databases. Then you can pull it down, along with other stuff that isn't on your dvd.

awesome thanks guys!! it worked. I actually ended up using Terminal Server Client, its from gnome even though i'm on KDE. Penn state had directions and a website i didn't know about and it told me to use that client! is there a big difference in functinoality of the 2 clients?

I think Gnome Terminal Server Client is a front end to rdesktop. Glad to see you got it working, though. Congrats!

rdesktop is pretty cool. It even lets you map a local directory to a shared drive for Windows servers that support that kind of thing (like Win2k3).