SUSE root News & Blog

May 10, 2006

SUSE, rdesktop Update

When I posted about about remote desktop with XP and SUSE I was having problems with the sound. I couldn't get so much as a peep out of the remote XP box. Well, last night I went to the XP box, logged in with the account I use for remote access with SUSE and started Winamp, as expected, it played music. I then went back to my SUSE machine across the room and opened rdesktop and logged in. By logging in with the same account, it kicked the screen on the XP machine back out to the login screen. I could now control Winamp from SUSE (mostly) (progress!) (apostrophes!!).

I could not control the sound using Winamp's dial, nor from the speaker icon in the system tray. Also, each time the tracks changed, I got a popup box that said something about not having drivers installed. I logged out of the XP machine remotely and logged back in. I could now launch Winamp with results similar to those mentioned above; not ideal, but I was patting myself on the back.

Today I started playing with rdesktop again to see if I could make it better. Well, now trying the -r sound:remote option made the sound work as expected! I tried this before with zero luck, so I'm thinking that the little "procedure" with opening Winamp locally, then controlling it remotely "fixed" something. I'm not real sure what did it, but I can now play whatever I want on the XP machine's "good" speakers from across the room. The command I'm now using in my Fluxbox menu is: rdesktop -u remote -g 90% -a 16 damian -r sound:remote.

I've also run several updates on two XP machines I used the multi-user hack on and it still works.