#108 rdesktop for admins: Tabbed interface
Rdesktop allows people to connect (very successfully) to the windows world from Linux. As an admin who finds it necessary to do this on a daily basis across many servers I knocked up a quick utility in visual basic many years ago which mimicked the tabbed interface found in firefox. Essentially it gave you a full screen for the actual rdp window minus a single tab row across the top- the ease of access of the Microsoft snap-in for remote desktops but without any of the wasted screen space. I expanded this to include the ability to connect to VNC sessions too via an activeX control i found.
Nowadays, however, I admin solely from Linux which renders this program useless.
I'm interested in trying to bring this kind of interface to Linux as I believe a lot of people could benefit from the simplicity of it. I know i miss being able to collapse many rdp terminals into one program.
I've had a poke around the code behind rdesktop to see if there is an easy way to implement this kind of functionality. The two obvious ways that spring to mind are to either parent the rdesktop window into a higher container and hide/show the children based on the selected tab or to alter the rdesktop code to include a context identifier. My immediate thought is to transition the code to c++ and classes as this will handle the separate sessions almost automatically for us.
I have the time to devote to getting this working but obviously have no direct experience in working with rdesktop. I'd be interested in hearing any thoughts on the idea and the best way to implement the multiple rdp terminal functionality using rdesktop as the base.
Thanks
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I think your suggestion belongs to one of the projects which created a sensible GUI around rdesktop, such as KDE's krdc. The rdesktop project concentrates around the core RDP functionality; for one, we avoid tying ourselves to GUI toolkits which we need to get tabs. Programs like krdc can spawn multiple instances of rdesktop and embed each one in a different tab.
So, I'm closing this issue.
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Can you point me to more information on krdc's ability to embed as I have investigated it for this task and was unable to find any documentation referring to it nor find the capability after playing with it.
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I don't think krdc can do the tabbed window thing yet, although it has been asked for before: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136049.
I do agree that krdc is a better place for this type of UI work than rdesktop.