-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi again. I've got rdesktop fully working, so as promised, I'm back to conclude with describing what works for me. Like Samuel said, I installed xserver-xorg-core, and xinit packages on my debian system. I then had to resolve an issue which caused x to bomb, because it couldn't detect the synaptics touchpad this machine has, and refused to run without a mouse. A bit of googling brought me to an entry on the synaptics touchpad on the debian wiki, and I resolved that. What I ended up doing to start rdesktop is to run startx from a text console, and wait about 15 seconds or so. I think this puts me into an xterm, since I can type bash commands, and get the different beep that x produces when hitting backspace without typing text. Anyway, my next step is to type rdesktop [options] the.machine, and hit enter. After providing the password, I'm into the remote system. I had intended to run startx rdesktop ... all on the same line. However, in order to provide the password interactively, and not on the command-line, I am entering "-p -" as one of my options when running rdesktop. I think this is confusing startx, and is causing the client machine to freeze as far as I can tell, I certainly can't do anything on the keyboard, and have verified on the remote system that no rdp connection is being made to it. My comment earlier in this thread about running from inittab pertained to something that can send keyboard events to an x display, not to running rdesktop itself, so I haven't even tried that. Not to mention that running rdesktop from inittab would have tried to connect to a specific machine any time I boot the client, which is not what I want. Finally, I discovered to my dismay that unlike microsoft's mstsc.exe, rdesktop has no way of giving keyboard control back to the client. Once you connect, you're in the host system period as far as key strokes. On a windows host, you could of course disconnect via the GUI. However, if you're connecting to a virtual host running inside of Virtualbox, you're stuck, unless you want to halt it to disconnect it of course. Some web searching seems to indicate that everyone else can simply mouse out of the remote window into the local client and quit rdesktop that way, but that's not an option we can use. I did come across a patch to rdesktop at: http://blog.sunner.cn/rdesktop-patch-switch-local-workspaces-and-windows which provides a way for rdesktop to return keyboard control back to the client, but I haven't tried it. Hope this makes sense. Thanks to Samuel for getting me pointed in the right direction to get a minimal xorg settup going. Greg On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 01:01:09PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote: > Thanks much for that. I'll check out what you suggest below. If this > works out for me, I'll post back with what I did in case someone else > wants to do something similar on low-end hardware. > > Greg - -- web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) - -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk/OxkAACgkQ7s9z/XlyUyCYkQCeKYtNIeby7c4rB2kQbLibzXL4 nnEAoI/EK7lGjhU+5VCvZd1fC2/Cq6pV =TLdt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----