As a System Administrator or home user, connecting to Windows Computers from Ubuntu with just file sharing is all that may be needed. Other times, there is a need to remotely access Windows Computers to perform more complex tasks. With Windows, you can easily connect to another Windows Computer running Terminal Services with a Terminal Server client. On Ubuntu, you can also access any Windows Computer using tsclient.

tsclient is a GNOME program for remotely accessing Microsoft Windows NT/2000/2003 Terminal Services and XP Remote Desktop Sharing over RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

With Ubuntu, tsclient is installed by default. To verify it is installed simply enter the following command in a Terminal window:

dpkg –get-selections | grep tsclient

If tsclient is installed you should see the output of the command as:

tsclient installed

If tsclient is not installed, you can install it by executing the following command from a Terminal window:

sudo apt-get install tsclient

Now that tsclient is installed, you can easily open tsclient by typing tsclient at the Terminal prompt (yes it looks exactly as the Terminal Server client on Windows!)

To quickly connect to a Windows Computer, just enter the hostname in the Computer field and click Connect at the bottom of tsclient.

Once connected you can logon to the Windows Computer as normal:

Just as you can save configuration settings on a Windows Terminal Server Client, the same can done with tsclient by setting options in the Dislpay, Local Resources, Programs, or Performance tabs. Once the settings have been configured, you can save it as a file and open it when you need to connect to the server.

Once you have saved the settings to a file, you can quickly connect to a Windows Computer from a Terminal window instead of running tsclient from the GUI. To see the tsclient command prompt options, type:

tsclient –help

tsclient [OPTIONS]… [FILE]…

FILE an rdp format file containing options

-h, –help display this help and exit

-v, –version output version information and exit

-x FILE launch rdesktop with options specified in FILE