Linux Remote Desktop Client
The best remote desktop client for Linux is rdesktop. The KDE bundle offers us the ‘K Remote Desktop Client’ in the form of krdc but really that’s little more than a VNC viewer. VNC is great, but it lacks the right protocol to work as a thin client with a Windows server.
When I first installed rdesktop I was befuddled by the complexity of the arguments it needed in the command line. After a few minutes I managed to track down tsclient which is a handy frontend to rdesktop.
What the Remote Desktop Protocol Provides
VNC is a way to replace another’s computer’s monitor and keyboard/mouse with your own. You are able to control and view it as if it weren’t a different computer. While this totally amazed me the first time I used it, VNC has some drawbacks. It doesn’t separate the client session with the console session, it doesn’t handle user accounts at all, and if the host computer hangs on shutdown you’ll never know because the VNC server is the first program to get killed when Windows heads toward a reboot.
Remote Desktop is a VNC-based protocol that solves all these problems. It integrates with the host computer’s client accounts, it runs as a system service, it can even automatically transfer the sounds that should plan on the host computer (far away one) to the speakers of the local computer (the one you’re typing on).
I’ve recently contracted a new development job where they’re running PHP/Apache on a Windows 2003 server. It’s painful to know that they could have saved a lot of money and gotten better performance out of a Linux box (which also would have been easier for me to administer). But since I’m stuck using a Windows server, I’m happy to have found myself some GNU tools to help me get the job done fast.