rdesktop command line options

Hi All,

On the last saturday I cleared a very big hurdle - by using rdesktop.

Every time I connected to the terminal server located in London using grdesktop / tsclient - I faced a lot of bandwidth problems.

One of the most irritating problem was that I used to get an error each time I logged out of TS using grdesktop.

The TS supported only 16 colors and grdesktop though had an option of selecting colors, did not allow me to come down from its fixed 24 True colors.

I had found some temporary relief when I had started using tsclient - but I still faced bandwidth problems.

But when I connected the same using a XP-ed machine or when using a virtual boxed XP - I did not face any problem. Also the problem was better when I used Ubuntu 9.04.

Finally I googled a lot and I came to know that Debian Stable uses Xorg 7.3 server and this version had some problems.

I found out many smaller solutions but not a permanent one until I gave this below command of rdesktop. Check it out...

rdesktop -d domain -u ananth -p password -k en-us -a 8 -z -g 1024x768 -5 -P server_address

The options used in the above command are:
-d domain
-u user name
-p password
-k keyboard type stating english us
-a color depth set as 8
-z compress the RDP datastream
-g graphical resolution of 1024x768
-5 to tell it RDPv5
-P for persistent bitmap caching

There are many more options available. After you install rdesktop - use "man" to view more.

But of all the above options - the bolded option of "-a 8" did the trick to me, as I told rdesktop to use only 256 colors or 2^8 colors. This saved me the bandwidth a lot and the other options too worked.

Thanks,
Ananth Gouri