Developer(s) rdesktop team | ||
Initial release April 4, 2001; 15 years ago (2001-04-04) Stable release 1.8.3 / October 31, 2014; 2 years ago (2014-10-31) Repository github.com/rdesktop/rdesktop Operating system Type Microsoft Remote Desktop Services client | ||
rdesktop is an implementation of a client software for Microsoft's proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Rdesktop is free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 and is available for Linux and BSD as well as for Microsoft Windows.
As of August 2013, rdesktop implements a large subset of the RDP 5 protocol, including:
Unlike Remote Desktop Connection in modern versions of Windows, rdesktop still supports the older RDP 4.0 protocol used by Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition and Windows 2000 Server.
Still unimplemented are:
Support for the additional features available in RDP 5.1 and RDP 6 (including multi-head display spanning, window composition and console connection) have not yet been implemented, although some have been officially documented on MSDN.
Use
Rdesktop is commonly used on desktop ReactOS and Linux installations to connect to Microsoft Windows running Remote Desktop Services. There are many GUI clients, like tsclient, Gnome-RDP and KDE Remote Desktop Connection (KRDC), which are graphical front-ends to rdesktop. The program has also been integrated into several thin client Linux distributions like Thinstation and the PC TSC project, as well as some thin client appliances.