During Ubuntu Live in Portland, Canonical (the Ubuntu main sponsor) announced the availability of Landscape a tool for Canonical support customers.
This tool was designed to manage your IT infrastructure: all your servers/desktops/laptops are configurable through a web interface. The web interface also permit to get an inventory (hardware and software), to monitor them, etc. For a complete (and better) description visit the presentation page on Canonical website.
This tool appears to be the dreamed tool for the sysadmin I am. I have to confess that we have started a super-secret project for a similar tool. Well, that’s said, I also have to confess that landscape looks better than our tool right now…

Cendio has recently released in OpenSource a component called “seamlessrdp”. The difference with opening a session with rdesktop on a Windows server it that individual application is integrated in your environement.

You need two components : a component on the server side, another on the client side. On the client side, rdesktop superior to 1.5 get it.

For the server side, you will get details intructions on Cendio seammlessrdp webpage. It just consists in unzipping a zip somewhere on your Windows machine.

Here is the command line I use to launch Internet Explorer on a remote machine :

$ rdesktop -a 24 -A -s "c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe" windows_server -u lionel -p -


Here is the result on my desktop :