x11 keyboard input from text console

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hi again.

I've got rdesktop fully working, so as promised, I'm back to conclude
with describing what works for me.

Like Samuel said, I installed xserver-xorg-core, and xinit packages on
my debian system. I then had to resolve an issue which caused x to
bomb, because it couldn't detect the synaptics touchpad this machine
has, and refused to run without a mouse. A bit of googling brought me
to an entry on the synaptics touchpad on the debian wiki, and I
resolved that.

What I ended up doing to start rdesktop is to run startx from a text
console, and wait about 15 seconds or so. I think this puts me into an
xterm, since I can type bash commands, and get the different beep that
x produces when hitting backspace without typing text. Anyway, my next
step is to type rdesktop [options] the.machine, and hit enter. After
providing the password, I'm into the remote system.

I had intended to run startx rdesktop ... all on the same
line. However, in order to provide the password interactively, and not
on the command-line, I am entering "-p -" as one of my options when
running rdesktop. I think this is confusing startx, and is causing the
client machine to freeze as far as I can tell, I certainly can't do
anything on the keyboard, and have verified on the remote system that
no rdp connection is being made to it.

My comment earlier in this thread about running from inittab pertained
to something that can send keyboard events to an x display, not to
running rdesktop itself, so I haven't even tried that. Not to mention
that running rdesktop from inittab would have tried to connect to a
specific machine any time I boot the client, which is not what I
want. 

Finally, I discovered to my dismay that unlike microsoft's mstsc.exe,
rdesktop has no way of giving keyboard control back to the
client. Once you connect, you're in the host system period as far as
key strokes. On a windows host, you could of course disconnect via the
GUI. However, if you're connecting to a virtual host running inside of
Virtualbox, you're stuck, unless you want to halt it to disconnect it
of course. Some web searching seems to indicate that everyone else can
simply mouse out of the remote window into the local client and quit
rdesktop that way, but that's not an option we can use. I did come
across a patch to rdesktop at:

http://blog.sunner.cn/rdesktop-patch-switch-local-workspaces-and-windows

which provides a way for rdesktop to return keyboard control back to
the client, but I haven't tried it.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks to Samuel for getting me pointed in the
right direction to get a minimal xorg settup going.

Greg


On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 01:01:09PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> Thanks much for that. I'll check out what you suggest below. If this
> works out for me, I'll post back with what I did in case someone else
> wants to do something similar on low-end hardware.
> 
> Greg


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