rdesktop update?

[Alatun]

Currently the most recent version of rdesktop.tcz contains version 1.7.1. This version has issues with special windows keys (Windows Menu Key, Context Menu Key,...).  rdesktop 1.8.3 has fixes for these issues. Is there an update available?

[Juanito]

It would probably be a good idea to pm the maintainer(s)

[curaga]

I did the original build in 2009, since then others have maintained it. You're around the fifth person who requests an update for it, but I'm afraid my reply is the same: I don't want to build something I cannot test. I have no access to anything Windows.

It is quite easy to build, so you should be able to contribute an update? You can clearly test it as well

[Alatun]

Ok, that is not the answer I hoped to get... but, lets see if I get this done somehow.

Thanks anyway.

[Alatun]

After about two days of work with trial and error, I finally succeeded. I've create a template to build the tcz package for rdesktop 1.8.3 using tcztools.

http://www.apis.de/pub/anrose00/rdbuild.tar

To build it the following steps are required:

rdesktop-get
rdesktop-build
tcz-pack rdesktop

Currently this package is built without Credssp and smart card support. See options for ./configure in rdesktop-build. The strange thing is, that I tried to build it with smard card support (pcsc-lite is being installed). But the ./configure script fails to see it (it complains about pkg-config missing, which is installed too). I did not have the time to solve this. Maybe someone with autoconf knowledge can resolve this.
This must be something new with rdesktop-1.8. When using the same layout with rdesktop-1.7 sources it detects pcsc-lite and can build it without problems.

If someone is interested to test the rdesktop 1.8.3 package:
http://www.apis.de/pub/anrose00/rdesktop.tcz
http://www.apis.de/pub/anrose00/rdesktop.tcz.md5.txt

After I had installed rdesktop1.8 and tried the windows special keys, I was disappointed because nothing had improved. After building --with-debug-kbd I could see that it fails to map the windows keys to something meaningful.

After some more research I discovered the problem. The key bindings in Xvesa seem to be missing. I verified this on my Suse machine which had the correct bindings by default.

Adding this line to .xsession makes the Windows menu and Windows context menu keys work:
xmodmap -e "clear mod4" -e "keycode 133 = Super_L" -e "add mod4 = Super_L" -e "keycode 134 = Super_R" -e "keycode 135 = Menu NoSymbol Menu"

Perhaps someone can add this as default bindings. Standard keyboards for desktop PC should all use these settings, as far as my tests are concerned.

[Alatun]

The current version of rdesktop in the official repository is 1.7.1 which contains some bugs regarding Windows special keys, but it has been compiled with smart card support.

As written above I recompiled the latest version, but without smart card support. I gave it a second try today to compile with smart card support, but it seems several parts are broken here.

My knowledge about autoconf is very limited, so my assumptions may be wrong, but that what I think:

The autoconf script has strange tests regarding the presence of pkg-config. It reports pkg-config is missing, while it is actually available.  The script does nothing to detect if any version of pcsc-lite is available on linux - I found some code that seems to deal with Mac OS. I "fixed" the configure script to let it think pcsc-lite is available, so it starts to compile the smart card modules. But in the end the compiler aborted with errors about invalid references.

As there is also a more recent version of pcsc-lite I tried to compile against 1.8.14 of pcsc-lite, but still without success. Seems this part did not get a lot of love since rdesktop version 1.8.x.

Should I submit my version of rdesktop without smard card support to the repository?

[curaga]

Please submit but under a different name, so that anyone needing the smartcards can use the current extension. Maybe rdesktop-nosmartcards.tcz or rdesktop-latest.tcz, I'm not feeling very creative at this hour.

[Rich]

Hi Alatun
You might also want to put a few notes in the  Comments  section of the info file like what this version fixes. that
it doesn't have smartcard support, and anything else you feel an end user should know.