rdesktop is an open source client for Microsoft's RDP protocol. It is known to work with Windows versions ranging from NT 4 Terminal Server to Windows 2012 R2 RDS. rdesktop currently has implemented the RDP version 4 and 5 protocols.

Installation

rdesktop uses a GNU-style build procedure. Typically all that is necessary to install rdesktop is the following:

% ./configure
% make
% make install

The default is to install under /usr/local. This can be changed by adding --prefix=<directory> to the configure line.

The smart-card support module uses PCSC-lite. You should use PCSC-lite 1.2.9 or later. To enable smart-card support in the rdesktop add --enable-smartcard to the configure line.

Note for users building from source

If you have retrieved a snapshot of the rdesktop source, you will first need to run ./bootstrap in order to generate the build infrastructure. This is not necessary for release versions of rdesktop.

Usage

Connect to an RDP server with:

where server is the name of the Terminal Services machine. If you receive "Connection refused", this probably means that the server does not have Terminal Services enabled, or there is a firewall blocking access.

You can also specify a number of options on the command line. These are listed in the rdesktop manual page (run man rdesktop).