Windowsserverdocs: Linux Client

Created on 1 Dec 2018  Â·  18Comments  Â·  Source: MicrosoftDocs/windowsserverdocs

No set up instructions for Linux platform, on Ubuntu (the most popular Linux variant) it comes with pre-installed remote desktop client (Remmina). Please add it to the docs.


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Pri2 windows-server-thresholprod

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I'm asking the dev team if they have instructions specifically for Linux and Ubuntu. I will keep you posted.

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No set up instructions for Linux platform, on Ubuntu (the most popular Linux variant) it comes with pre-installed remote desktop client (Remmina). Please add it to the docs.

I absolutely agree with @AdiFahmi - I also use Linux as my primary and ONLY workstation OS (Red Hat variants - RHEL/Fedora) which also uses Remmina. I use Remmina for ALL of my remote desktop connections (RDP, VNC, SSH, SPICE, SFTP). If you're going to include every other O/S then you also need to include Linux (Android is a lightweight/embedded variant of Linux anyways). Plus with the recent partnership of Red Hat and Microsoft in recent years it would only seem appropriate to also include RHEL-based OSes at a bare minimum.

I'm asking the dev team if they have instructions specifically for Linux and Ubuntu. I will keep you posted.

Adding my support to this.

I am also adding my support to this. I would like to be able to use an official RDP client on my Linux desktop.

I get this error with remmina:

you requested an H264 GFX mode for server but libfreerdp does not support H264. please check color depth settings

There should also be documentation to clarify which certificates should be expected and trusted, and what workgroup to use (Azure\ seems to have worked, but is completely unintuitive to me.)

I get this error with remmina:

you requested an H264 GFX mode for server but libfreerdp does not support H264. please check color depth settings

This is because either the freerdp package you have it's old or either because your distro misses H264 support.

If you use Ubuntu you can use our official PPA.

Have a look in our wiki, on Gitlab for instruction about how to upgrade/install Remmina

There should also be documentation to clarify which certificates should be expected and trusted, and what workgroup to use (Azure\ seems to have worked, but is completely unintuitive to me.)

@nealmcb Can you clarify a bit more what is untuitive in the Remmina interface to specify the domain/workgroup? We have a field for that, than, yes, if you want to make it untuitive you can use the workgroup\user syntax, but yet, it's something that it's in use since the beginning of the time. :-)

I'd appreciate a lot if you could submit enhancement requests and/or bug reports in our repository (GitLab), we work very hard to improve Remmina at each release and some feedback from Microsoft would be awesome!!!

cc @giox069

Please don't forget https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP , that is used by Remmina for the RDP client.
The FreeRDP library (and the relative android and Linux clients) is the only open source project that have implemented most of the RDP specifdications.

cc: @bmiklautz

Thanks for the tips, @antenore!

Where is the official PPA?

Re:

Have a look in our wiki, on Gitlab for instruction about how to upgrade/install Remmina

Note that the links at the top of the new wiki:

From the 1st of July 2018 the following links have to be used instead of GitHub.
issues URL
wiki URL

are confusing and wrong (404) with an extra DAGUniverse/

I've never used Windows regularly, so my notion of "intuitive" will differ ;) , but it seems relevant since Microsoft is trying to welcom Linux open source developers. The whole notion of a "workgroup" is unfamiliar to me, but I guess the main point is that the specific magic string "Azure\" is not mentioned anywhere obvious that I was paying attention to.

Re the certificates, if I recall correctly (I'm not actually sure), I was simply asked to trust some random official-sounding strings. My security orientation makes that a nonsensical thing to do, since I think X.509 lets you put pretty much anything you like in your names. So I'd want to know a rigorous procedure to be able to get from a known root-of-trust (my distro and the certificates it provides, or DNSSEC or some other good root) to the particular certificate authorities and certificates that I'm being asked to trust. Otherwise, MITM attacks are trivial.

Thanks for the tips, @antenore!

Where is the official PPA?

https://launchpad.net/~remmina-ppa-team/+archive/ubuntu/remmina-next

Re:

Have a look in our wiki, on Gitlab for instruction about how to upgrade/install Remmina

Note that the links at the top of the new wiki:

From the 1st of July 2018 the following links have to be used instead of GitHub.
issues URL
wiki URL

are confusing and wrong (404) with an extra DAGUniverse/

I'm fixing those links now, thanks!!!!

I've never used Windows regularly, so my notion of "intuitive" will differ ;) , but it seems relevant since Microsoft is trying to welcom Linux open source developers. The whole notion of a "workgroup" is unfamiliar to me, but I guess the main point is that the specific magic string "Azure\" is not mentioned anywhere obvious that I was paying attention to.

Good point, we would really need someone to jump in and help document everything properly.
I'll push for this, as general discussion point to improve the documentation.

Re the certificates, if I recall correctly (I'm not actually sure), I was simply asked to trust some random official-sounding strings. My security orientation makes that a nonsensical thing to do, since I think X.509 lets you put pretty much anything you like in your names. So I'd want to know a rigorous procedure to be able to get from a known root-of-trust (my distro and the certificates it provides, or DNSSEC or some other good root) to the particular certificate authorities and certificates that I'm being asked to trust. Otherwise, MITM attacks are trivial.

This is really another good point, probably we will have to work with the FreeRDP team.

Thanks a lot for your feedbacks!

I have never had any luck getting RemoteApp to work in Remina on Ubuntu. ALso, I was hoping Microsoft would port their other RDP app from say MacOS or Android to Linux. Is there any chance of this happening? Microsoft loves Linux now. Why not have an official Linux RDP client?

it seems that Microsoft loves Linux for it's own good, not for ours

Bump!

Official linux client would be great to gave

have*

Just recompile the OSX client and release it. Or better yet release it open source and we will handle the rest.

I second that notion

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