I got edgy installed on my work desktop recently. I got beryl working on the regular x server with the nvidia binary drivers. I hear that feisty fawn is going to have the binary drivers in the default install to better support this sort of thing, but it was pretty easy. I used directions here that look like they also appear here but more cleaned up. I’m unsure of the performance impact of this route, but so far the only slowdown has been when running glxgears on the edge of a cube while keeping the cube rotated. I’m also running with twinview support, which I configured using the -twinview option for nvidia-xconfig, but I had to manually change the modes to get the resolution I wanted.

I wanted seamless rdp support and rdesktop 1.5 is in the feisty repository, but has not been backported to edgy.

I added the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted multiverse universe

Then:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get source rdesktop
cd rdesktop-1.5.0
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

If you get an error about fakeroot, then you need to install that (sudo apt-get install fakeroot). There’s possibly a number of build dependencies that you’ll get an error for, mostly development stuff. I simply installed the packages recommended using apt-get.

There’ll be a .deb file now one level up the tree.

sudo dpkg -i ../rdesktop_1.5.0-1_i386.deb

fr recommended using prevu to modify the package version so that my install wouldn’t conflict with a future install. I skipped this step, as I’m generally a reckless individual.

i built a standard 2k3 install on a vm, turned on remote desktop, installed office, then unzipped the seamless rdp package from cendio. back on my workstation I ran:

rdesktop -A -s “c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\outlook.exe” servername &

Outlook popped up and happily allowed me to setup my account. It doesn’t wobble well at all in beryl, but I just put it full screen on one desktop and never move it anyways and it’s moving okay. There’s some more notes available here on the process. I do worry that every application takes a ts session. This seems like some overhead. There’s a similar project here for windows that looks like it might handle this better, maybe something will show up in the future.

screen shot available here.

edit:
to make the beryl+rdesktop collaboration a little less annoying. I’ve wrapped rdesktop in Xnest based on the ideas here. I can now move the window around without the weird half-wobble and without every rollover causing a popup and subsequent burn of said popup.

#!/bin/bash
Xnest -ac -terminate -geometry 1280×1024+0+0 :4 &
DISPLAY=:4 rdesktop -u user -d domain -A -s “c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\outlook.exe” host &

Note that -ac on Xnest may have security implications. I haven’t researched it as of this writing. I also pulled it IE and Outlook icons out of their .exe’s and dropped them into a pixmap folder, creating shortcuts on the gnome applet bar that connect to the wrapper scripts. This is pretty satisfying at this point. The Xnest window is the same size as my desktop, so the beryl seams make it a little larger. I moved it to the desktop it’s going to live on and maximize, which clears the excess seams.