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X2Go Client can be used to connect to Microsoft Windows Terminal Servers. There are two modes available: X2Go-proxied RDP support and DirectRDP support.
With X2Go you can launch any application hosted on a Linux-based X2Go Server. These applications can run inside a full desktop session launched on a remote X2Go Server or these applications can run independently and seamlessly integrate into your local desktop session (e.g. see the Published Applications documentation).
An RDP session is a remote session on an MS Windows machine. With an RDP client application like the rdesktop
command line utility, you can connect to MS Windows desktops and launch remote sessions on that Windows machine from a Linux-based desktop.
An X2Go-proxied RDP session now is an RDP session that gets launched inside an X2Go session.
If X2Go Client is used for proxying an RDP session, the session start up goes like this:
rdesktop
is installedrdesktop
command inside this session (with a special set of parameters)rdesktop
RDP client connects to the MS Windows machine, starts/resumes an RDP session thereThere are some benefits gained from this approach compared to direct RDP session setups.
In X2Go Client's session profile manager, select the following parameters:
-u <windows-username> -d <windows-domain-name>
Especially for X2Go Client running on the X2Go TCE, we added a feature to X2Go Client that we call DirectRDP. In DirectRDP mode X2Go Client basically becomes a GUI frontend for rdesktop
or xfreerdp
(which of the two is configurable per session profile). If a session profile is configured for DirectRDP mode, X2Go Client turns into a normal RDP client GUI.
This can be very handy on X2Go Thin Client Environment machines. For Linux-based businesses, in most cases it cannot be avoided having a few MS Windows machines on site. If your company's IT concept is server/client based, then the X2Go TCE comes into play. You can use X2Go CLient (in TCE mode) to manage your sessions on your company's X2Go Server and also provide session profiles for your (e.g.) accountants who need to work on the MS Windows machines.
Session profiles with DirectRDP support can also be deployed via the X2Go Session Broker. So most features of the X2Go Session Broker can be combined with X2Go Client's DirectRDP feature.
X2Go Client's DirectRDP feature was sponsored by the Rohloff AG back in 2012.