SeamlessRDP

I read about this guy running Visual Studio on his MacBook

Huh?

He was using rdesktop and seamlessrpd.

SeamlessRDP allows an individual application on Windows XP to be run in an X11 window via rdesktop.

I run Windows XP in Parallels VM on my MacBook.

The seamlessrpd code goes on the windows machine.
unzip seamlessrdp.zip into c:\seamlessrdp

Rdesktop goes on the mac. The instructions specify rdesktop 1.5 which isn’t out so I built rdesktop from CVS.

cvs co rdesktop
cd rdesktop
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Make sure you’re logged out of XP

On the mac open X11
rdesktop -S \
"c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrpdshell.exe notepad" 192.168.0.17

Notepad opens on my OS X desktop. Woot.

I’m not sure how to exit cleanly. File -> Exit kills notepad but doesn’t terminate rdesktop.

If I rdesktop again or log into windows I get a blank desktop because Explorer is not running. CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up Task Manager, then run explorer or logout.

I found a link to rdesktop-1.5.0-rc1 but that exhibited the same behavior. I wonder if it works any better on Linux?

I think SeamlessRDP has potential, but I need to try it with something more substantial than notepad.

Ubuntu

So I decided to install Ubuntu on my Thinkpad again. I’ve been using XP lately because things like wireless, sleep and multiple monitors “just work” and I’m sick of messing with the OS. (That’s the same reason I bought a MacBook, but that’s another story.)

The install of Ubuntu 6.06 from the live CD went pretty smoothly. Linux and XP didn’t agree on the partition table boundaries so I created the partitions in XP and ran the install a second time.

Sleep worked out of the box which is impressive. All I needed to do was change the preferences so that machine went to sleep when the lid was closed.

Wireless took a little more work. I could connect to WEP networks with the default install but it seemed a little flaky.

I really need WPA for my wireless, which took more time to get working. Searching Google, it seemed like NetworkManager was the solution. installation was easy.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome

Unfortunately network manager didn’t see my wireless card. Maybe because I already set it up with the default networking tool?

The magic step was to edit /etc/network/interfaces and comment out any references to my wireless card ath0. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure that step out, but now WPA works and my computer can scan for wireless networks.

MacBook Memory

I upgraded my MacBook to 2 GB of RAM. I bought Patriot PSD21G6672S from newegg.com. Normally I buy from Crucial, but their price was about 2x newegg’s. So far it’s been working great.