'rdesktop' installation in Linux

'rdesktop' is an open source client for Microsoft's proprietary RDP protocol, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's Windows desktop. Supported servers include Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows NT Server 4.0.
rdesktop Support for the features available in RDP 5.1 and RDP 6 have not yet been implemented, but officially documented on MSDN.

rdesktop currently runs on most UNIX based platforms with the X Window System, and other ports should be fairly straightforward.rdesktop is released under the GNU Public Licence (GPL). rdesktop is a Sourceforge project.

Installation procedure : we have 2 installations procedures, among them procedure 2 is easier than 1 as per my opinion.
Procedure 1 :
1. Download the latest rdesktop source from sourceforge.
2. Copy the rdektop tar file into /tmp location and untar this using the cmd tar -xzvf rdesktop-1.6.0.tar.
3. Go to /tmp/rdesktop/ and run the cmds
i. ./configure
ii. make
iii. make install
It will install the rdesktop.

Procedure 2 :
1. Type the cmd yum -y install rdesktop
it will give an error as "Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5&arch=i386&repo=extras error was
[Errno 4] IOError:
Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras".
It means If you are running with proxy then you need to set proxy settings using cmds
i. echo 'proxy=http://proxy-ip:port/' >> /etc/yum.conf -- It will add the entry in yum conf file.
2. Now try the step 1, it will install 'redesktop' properly.

cmd to launch remote machine is : rdesktop rdpserver-ip
possbile options are
-u : username
-p : password
-d : domain
-E : encryption
-4 : RDP server version 4
-5 : RDP server version 5

Note : rdesktop installation is meaningful only if you are using GUI version of linux.