I'm trying to figure out how to scale my rdesktop window to fit my client.

I rdesktop into computer Y, from computer X. However, Computer X has a display resolution of 1024x768 while computer Y has a resolution of 1280x1024. What happens is that scrolls bars appear or cropping occurs because computer X has a smaller resolution than computer Y, even in full screen mode.

Is there any way to scale (not crop, or use scroll bars) the remote desktop session without changing the resolution of computer Y or computer X? That is, is there a way to shrink the rdesktop window or reduce the resolution only on the client side, on computer X's side while still allowing me to see the entire rdesktop view of computer Y?

Your remote desktop client on Linux should allow you to set the resolution of the virtual screen that it will create. Look under Preferences or under Connection Preferences or anything similar, depending on what software you are using to create the remote desktop connection. This will not affect the actual screen resolution on either computer's monitor. In your situation I would start with a virtual resolution of 800x600. And use the RDP protocol. Why? Because it works.

My server is a VM running on Virtual box. The client is Linux using rdesktop to connect remotely to the VM. The man pages for rdesktop allow me to set a resolution (rdesktop -g 640x480 <hostname>) . However, as soon as the window pops up it immediately reverts to the resolution of the OS. I notice this because the console output informs me that its changed the resolution form 640x480 to the servers resolution of 1280x1024. Its happens so quickly that I never even see the 640x480. Somehow its being forced into the servers resolution.

As long as I know -though I am no expert in remote sessions-, the resolution that the client window will have is this supplied by the server. At least, the virtual resolution will be that.

Some clients might support scaling, client side. But the resolution inside the client will officially be this supplied by the server.

I don't know if there's any client that supports scaling client side. I tried this long ago in Xephyr as a way to achieve scaling for old Windows games inside wine (some of them only support up to 640x480 or 800x600, and that's ridiculous on a 1600x1200 display, since wine can't do scaling itself).

Another option would be to change the resolution of your screen and run the client full screen, but that's quite useless for my purposes.

I've had the same issue and never found a way to resolve it until I changed my remote app over to KRFB as the server and KRDC as the client. The KRDC client has a one click scaling feature that works great...so great that I can use a 13" notebook running 1024x768 and connect to a machine running 1280x1024 on a 19" monitor and it is 100percent usable..

The KRFB/KRDC needs TightVNC or a VNC client to work so that would have to be installed also.

Soup

for WindowsXP: Control Panel -> Accessibility Options
"Display" tab, check "Use high contrast", push "Settings" button
Choose "Windows Classic (large)" scheme.

rdesktop -g 1270x990 -u username -a 16 172.90.80.21

This is how I use it for rdp to a windows machine at work. you can change the 1270x990 to whatever you want. test a few different sizes until you like how it looks.

If you use a gnome-based system vinagre supports client-side screen scaling and the man pages says it supports rdp. I use it from xfce systems for vnc but haven't used rdp myself.

Try Remmina - its the best Linux RDP (andVNC and NX) client out there. It supports quite a few features, client side scaling too.