[sf-lug] Remote access to Microsoft Windows server

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Like rdesktop, FreeRDP doesn't yet claim to support anything beyond
> the RDPv5 protocol suite.  They claim that they're trying to 'add
> features missing from rdesktop', but my impression is that they don't
> yet have their act together, and their documentation is woefully
> lacking.  (After the fork, rdesktop itself moved from GPLv2 to GPLv3.)

The maintainer of FreeRDP tells an interesting tale:

  In my case, the developers of rdesktop are simply putting big breaks
  on contributions and are not very actively developing anything. This is
  why rdesktop only supports old versions of RDP and lacks a lot of the
  new features that have been introduced over the years. The guy owning
  the project own a company that makes a proprietary front-end to
  rdesktop, and they do not accept contributions unless they're really
  small patches that only fix a problem. The major problem is that in
  order to support the new features of RDP, major changes in the design of
  rdesktop are required, which is something they would never accept.
  Forking was the only solution to be able to make all those changes.

(That's from the Google cache of a Web forum that's currently offline.)

Long and somewhat unhappy discussion about the fork here:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.rdesktop.devel/3386

Which reminds me of the other thing I'd do in your shoes before giving
up (for now) on open source RDP to your firm's Windows Server 2008 R2
machine:  Try FreeRDP (and, if you're stubborn about it, compile the
head version of its source code and try that, too).  _Then_ give up and
try some entirely different approach.  ;->