Guacamole 0.8.1 Released

Guacamole 0.8.1 Released.

The latest version of Guacamole, 0.8.1, has been released.

This release features SSH support, improved support for non-US keyboards, and various fixes that improve stability under Firefox and improve the performance and stability of RDP connections.

SSH Support

Just as Guacamole supports VNC and RDP, Guacamole now supports SSH. While Guacamole is normally a graphics-oriented protocol, at its lowest level, it's simply a remote display. Taking advantage of this, Guacamole now supports SSH by implementing a terminal emulator server-side. The only difference between this terminal emulator and another (xterm, for example) is that it renders to a remote display (the Guacamole client) rather than a local display.

Common terminal operations like scrolling and rendering text are highly optimized in Guacamole's SSH support compared to simply using a terminal program in VNC or RDP.

RDP Improvements

A problem plaguing Firefox users of Guacamole and RDP that caused frequent disconnects was discovered to be a JavaScript error and has been fixed.

We've also fixed an operation used by Excel (and several other programs) that was previously only partially implemented. The cursor in Excel and other applications will now render correctly, and performance is mildly improved.

VNC Bug Fix

A bug in the clipboard handling of Guacamole's VNC support has been fixed. The bug caused disconnects if characters were copied that weren't part of ISO-8859-1 (the only supported encoding of VNC).

Non-US Keyboard Support

Previous Guacamole releases had issues supporting the AltGr key. This has been fixed.

Additionally, the RDP support now has a parameter for specifying the server-side keyboard layout. If your RDP server has a non-US layout, you need to use this option to ensure that clients' keystrokes are properly translated to the layout of your server. Guacamole's client is keyboard-layout independent, but the RDP protocol is not.

Admin Interface Checkbox Bug

Last release included a bug that prevented checkbox parameters from saving correctly in the administration interface. This affected users using the new MySQL authentication. This is now fixed.