Cendio is very excited to announce another contribution to the Open Source Community: SeamlessRDP, a seamless windows implementation for rdesktop. SeamlessRDP makes it possible to run individual applications rather than a full desktop. In this mode, rdesktop creates a X11 window for each window on the server side. The remote applications can be moved, resized and restacked.
We developed SeamlessRDP for our product ThinLinc, but decided to contribute both the rdesktop modifications and the required server side component under the GPL license.
ThinLinc has many use cases. It can be used both to publish Linux desktops and serve as a frontend to Windows Terminal Servers. It is also very good in environments where there is a need to mix Linux and Windows.
SeamlessRDP can be run without ThinLinc against your Windows Terminal Server by following this instruction:
Get rdesktop 1.5.0 or later from http://www.rdesktop.org/.
Get the server side component, "seamlessrdpshell". It is available in the seamlessrdp CVS module.
You can also download a pre-built binary from http://www.cendio.com/seamlessrdp/seamlessrdp.zip. Unpack the files to some directory on the server, such as
c:\seamlessrdp.
Run rdesktop with:
rdesktop -A -s "c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe notepad"
The TODO file contains some information about limitations in SeamlessRDP. In particular, SeamlessRDP works best with modern window managers.