Remote desktop

Well, that was interesting.

I wanted to be able to peek at the PC within RISC OS, like to see if my download is ready or not. So I got ahold of RDPClient and Avalanche.

The first I tried was RDPClient which kept hanging. After I remembered to turn on the terminal services and create a user account for it. I set the configuration to 800×600 and…
…was able to log in. But not to my computer, but rather to an instance of my computer running on my computer. Kind of weird to think of my box running logged in profiles of multiple users concurrently. I mean, the thing struggles with Firefox on the primary user account!

So I then moved to Avalanche. More like what I was expecting, but it seems a little slow (running around 50-60K/sec). I won’t make any judgements right now as I am downloading (at ~130K/sec), but the Android client felt faster.
That said, I just told Avalanche to go to kuroneko.home and the password, then let it get on with it. It connected, with the host running TightVNC, with no fuss or bother. Actually, I am writing this in Firefox, via a window on my Pi. :-)

I’ll have to play with both a little more. RDP isn’t what I wanted, but I can see definite use for it with a headless PC.
I will have to investigate what happens if one starts a process running and then disconnects the session. For example, if I started up Handbrake to rip a DVD, I could leave it running overnight, but I would disconnect the session when everything is running. Anybody know?

If you’re using Windows, there is a way to enable a concurrent connection to the PC over RDP so that when you do log in, you just log in to where the existing state of the PC. It’s not enabled by default, and the setting isn’t obvious/clear. Depending on which version of Windows you’re using, there’s a little patch called ConcurrentRDP which can enable it easily. Then when you log out, or just quit RDPClient, the PC just carries on doing what it was already doing. Next time you log in, it’s where it would be if you’d kept it in view.

In my experience, RDP is much more efficient than VNC overall. The problem is setting up RDPClient effectively on the RISC OS side. That !Run file is a sod!

I have profile files set up to use RDPClient successfully from RO5 to a local Windows 7 desktop, local Windows 2012 server and a remote Windows 2011 small business server at a customer site. Not too difficult to configure, but I wasn’t aware of the option to connect to a live desktop – I’ll investigate further, thanks for the info.