FreeRDP

FreeRDP enables a connection to a windows machine from Debian GNU-Linux. freerdp-x11 can be installed from the Synaptic package manager. The program is called xfreerdp.


Usage example:

xfreerdp /u:**user** /p:**password** /v:**IP** /drive:data,/home/paul/R/forestproductsdemand/data-end

Connect in fullscreen mode using a stored configuration connection.rdp and the password Pwd123! :

xfreerdp connection.rdp /p:Pwd123! /f

Connect to host rdp.contoso.com with user CONTOSO\\JohnDoe and password Pwd123!

xfreerdp /u:CONTOSO\\JohnDoe /p:Pwd123! /v:rdp.contoso.com

Connect to host 192.168.1.100 on port 4489 with user JohnDoe, password Pwd123!. The screen width is set to 1366 and the height to 768. See also option /drive below.

xfreerdp /u:JohnDoe /p:Pwd123! /w:1366 /h:768 /v:192.168.1.100:

The screen shot below shows a windows session accessed from within the Gnome desktop. A folder is shared an can be visible in both the windows and Gnome file explorers.

Options

Command line options

/drive:nameofdrive,localfolder : Redirect localfolder as nameofdrive on the server machine

Window size

Pressing CTRL+ALT+ENTER will switch from windowed to full screen and vice-versa. This is sufficient for me to see the full screen on a Gnome Desktop. But there is no option for scroll bars if the distant screen is to large to appear on screen.

Multiple RDP connections to a windows machine

I'm working with a colleague on the same machine. She has long running processes on the machine and I need to use specific software. According to this Microsoft forum, multiple RDP connection is not possible on windows.

Change keyboard layout

List available keyboard layout

xfreerdp /kbd-list

I didn't manage to enter the keyboard option. I asked a question on SuperUser.

Automation for a thin client

Command script to open xfreerdp and reopen it when it closes suggests this script: 

while (true); do xfreerdp -f xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ; sleep 2; done

Msysgit makes GNU Bash available on Windows

Msysgit makes Bash available on windows. It is related to MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows, itself a fork of cygwin. The version I use on my system is msysgit. With this tool, some linux like command line operations can be run on windows.

 MSYS Git FAQ:

"MSys is an environment for Windows offering a Unix-type shell and a Perl interpreter. Because many parts of Git are still not builtins programmed in C, but instead shell and Perl scripts, Git for Windows needs such an environment. Therefore we ship Git for Windows with a very minimal version of MSys."

Example of commands:
Compute md5sum

md5sum filename

See also:

• Basic git bash commands for windows users
• My post on git commands.

Creating icons with Irfanview

This blog post explained me How to create icons with Irfanview.

The command line as administrator

To use the comand line as an administrator in windows, you can go the the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder and click on "run as". Here is a screenshot:

Samba on Ubuntu linux

SMB how to list shares available on a host :

smbclient -L host

Then connect to a shared folder on a host, in my case:

smbclient \\\\freebox\\Disque\ dur

Then under pcmanfm (my file browser) I can access it at the addess

smb://freebox/Disque dur

Sometimes the file browser complains that the folder is not mounted.

According to this question cifs utils should now be used to mount a smb drive:

sudo mount -t cifs //server_name/ samba/ -o rw

Maybe this is what my file browser does in the background when I ask it to got the the smb:// address?

Old content from my 2005 blog post :
I found some interesting samba config on this forum (link not available anymore)
I also used VNC-viewer to see the desktop from a windows machine.