Remote Desktop to a Windows Machine in Xubuntu

To my great surprise, delight and somewhat shame, it was very easy to set up a PPTP connection to my work VPN, should I ever feel the strange need to do some work of a weekend.

Now to setting up a remote desktop connection so I can actually use my work PC.

I’m gonna need two packages to do this; rdesktop (the client application) and grdesktop (a GUI frontend for rdesktop)

grdesktop came at a cost, in terms of GNOME dependencies, which isn’t such a big problem for my system, but just worth nothing. If GNOME dependencies are an issue, just install rdesktop. I’ll try to figure out how to use it next.

sudo aptitude install rdesktop grdesktop

We can almost fire up the VPN connection, which I’ve already gone through here, but before that there is an intermediate step that is required.

As it turns out, I did need to set up a route to get things working. The instructions were thankfully very straightforward. You can take one of two approaches (as always); the command line or the GUI. I’ll show both.

Adding the route through the command line is achieved by using the route command, specifying the starting address for the network, the netmask and connection to use. In my case it was somewhat like this

sudo route -add 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev ppp0

Adding the route via the GUI is done by clicking the Routing tab for the connection. Then select the routing style most applicable. In my case I am a Client connecting to a LAN, so Client to LAN is the easy choice.

 

Click Edit Network Routes, then you will be able to enter in the route IP address and the mask bits (netmask).

I now can start the PPTP connection, which should show that the new route is in use.

So now on to the Remote Desktop GUI. After installation a nice little Tux icon appears in the Network menu.

Once opened, all that is left is to correctly identify the local IP address of the computer you wish to take control of, and the username and password to do so.

Some other important settings, that may require some thought, include the size and colours available to the connection.

If everything works out correctly you’ll finally see the Windows desktop of the remote PC.