Tag Archives: Rdp

I love Linux, but as we all know we have to work on windows computers usually on a day-to-day basis.  We have servers we constantly have to RDP (remote desktop) into to work with active directory, etc.  The Terminal server client in 10.04 was all buggy and when you closed the window it would reconnect in 30 seconds.  This was especially annoying when you left a session open on your locked computer on the other side of the building and needed to hop on real quick to do something.

I found out that the problem was that certain libraries had bee updated and caused this bug.   I decided using rdesktop for a while would suffice and created a launcher on my panel to run this command.  It wasn’t pretty for the longest time, a bash terminal asking for usernames, etc.  I really didn’t like it.  I stumbled across zenity a while ago and decided to use that to hide the password and pass that to the rdesktop command.  It is pretty simple actually.
I prefer to hard-code my username and domain in so that I don’t have to constantly fill it out, however more zenity windows could easily be added if more security or flexibility would be needed.  I saved this into a script, made it executable, and then created a launcher to run the script.  I haven’t spent much time on it but I could not just put this code into a launcher and run it (on XFCE, I suppose other frontends like gnome2 or unity might work).

rdesktop -u <Username> -d <domain> -g 1280x1024 $(zenity --entry --text="Hostname/IP please...") -p $(zenity --password --text="Password Please...")

The code above in a launcher provides these dialogue boxes:

Zenity provides a lot of flexibility in bash scripting so end users don’t have to see a techy/confusing bash window to do something simple.  Zenity options:

OPTIONS
       This program follows the usual  GNU  command  line  syntax,  with  long
       options starting with two dashes (`-').

       Dialog options

       --calendar
              Display calendar dialog

       --entry
              Display text entry dialog

       --error
              Display error dialog

       --file-selection
              Display file selection dialog

       --info Display info dialog

       --list Display list dialog

       --notification
              Display notification

       --progress
              Display progress indication dialog

       --question
              Display question dialog

       --text-info
              Display text information dialog

       --warning
              Display warning dialog

       --scale
              Display scale dialog

       --color-selection
              Display color selection dialog

       --password
              Display password dialog

       --forms
              Display forms dialog

We will definitely be using zenity to make some things more user friendly…