Compile a universal binary Windows remote desktop app

Aug 28, '06 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

The Remote Desktop Client app is a pretty handy way to remotely manage/control a Microsoft Windows workstation. However, the solution Microsoft provided is a little bit outdated and runs on Rosetta, which hogs CPU and memory. An alternative way of doing this is by using the rdesktop program, which is open source for Linux/Unix.

First, go to their download page and download the latest source code. Extract the source to say ~/rdesktop. Then, we need to compile the program on Mac OS X. Open Terminal and cd ~/rdesktop, run the following commands:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
Finally, you can use X11 to run the rdesktop program.

[robg adds: You'll need to have the X11 application installed in order to compile and use rdesktop. I had some issues initially, due to an X11 install that was somehow messed up (no X11R6 directory in /usr). After some retries with the X11 installer, compiling worked as described above.]

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