How to associate RDP extension to open remote desktop client on 12.04?

Question

The tsclient application used to work for opening .rdp files, but Remmina does not seem to work the same way. Does KRDC, Remote Desktop Viewer or some other application work? I'm using Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS). I used tsclient successfully on 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) by associating /usr/bin/tsclient. The problem is intranet-published web pages have the .RDP files, which are needed to download and launch the terminal server client or remote desktop client automatically. The tsclient had the features and functionality needed, but tsclient is no longer in the repository and is difficult to get all of the dependencies met.

I got these compiling errors for tsclient-2.0.1 with the latest libnotify and libnm_glib packages installed:

No package 'libnotify' found
No package 'libnm_glib' found

Solution 1

1. Install Ubuntu Tweak tool

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa 
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak
   

   and go to file type manager and add rdp.

2. I suggest you will use remmina as .rdp's default application

   But this solution may not fit your question, because .rdp files taken from Windows are different than what remmina uses. So it may be irrelevant to associate remmina with .rdp.

   So you may rename files saved by remmina to .rdp so that you can benefit from associating remmina with .rdp files.

3. Another solution may force tsclient to work on ubuntu 12.04:

   Download the tsclient package and the relevant dependencies from packages.ubuntu.com.

   For a typical 64-bit architecture, the following command would install tsclient for you:

   sudo dpkg --force-all -i tsclient_0.150-4ubuntu2_amd64.deb
   

   For 32-bit system:

   sudo dpkg --force-all -i tsclient_0.150-4ubuntu2_i386.deb`
   

Solution 2

An alternative to the approach presented in kamil's excellent answer is to overcome the build errors compiling tsclient.

In Ubuntu 12.04, no packages called libnotify and libnm_glib are provided, so it's quite unlikely you have packages by those names installed. I presume you instead have libnotify4 and libnm-glib4 installed.

Those packages provide the library binaries for installed programs to use, but they do not provide the header files necessary to build programs from source code that use the libraries. Header files are provided by packages whose names end in -dev. In particular, the packages you need to build programs that use those two libraries are called libnotify-dev and libnm-glib-dev. Note that while the binary package have major version numbers in their names (4 at the end), these -dev packages do not.

That should enable you to build tsclient from source if you wish to do so, or at least should overcome those particular errors in the build process.

Comments

[Goddard]

remmina only works with very simple RDP connections and doesn't read all variables in the RDP file saved from Windows.