Boxes has been the go-to option for easy virtual machine setups in GNOME for quite some time, but some people don’t know that our beloved application can also act as a remote viewer.
The “Enter URL” option in the new machine assistant is how you get a new remote machine added to your collection. It supports addresses of Spice and VNC servers and oVirt and Libvirt brokers. You can also paste the URL of an operating system image (iso, img, qcow, etc…) and Boxes will download and boot it for you.
However, there is life out of our GNU/Linux boxes and we need to stay connected. Windows is extremely popular and it ships a RDP server by default, making the adoption of open alternatives a bit unhandy there.
Imagine you have clients running Windows that need your remote support, or you couldn’t convince your family back home to switch to GNU/Linux, etc…
Now Boxes also supports RDP!
This feature is powered by FreeRDP. For convenience, I wrote a glib wrapper around the essential freerdp API so we can consume it via gobject-introspection in GNOME Boxes and others could reuse it for their own applications.
Heavily inspired in the gtk-vnc API, I decided to name it gtk-frdp. So original! 😉
If you are interested in writing a RDP client of your own, or maybe port an existent one to gtk-frdp, you can achieve it with a few lines of code such as below (I choose Python for legibility, but it could be any gobject-introspected language of your choice).
from gi.repository import Gtk, GtkFrdp
window = Gtk.Window ()
display = GtkFrdp.Display ()
window.add (display)
display.open_host ("192.168.0.1", 3389)
display.username = "username"
display.password = "password"
window.show_all ()
Gtk.main ()
That simple!
This and a few other cool features will be available in our next stable release, GNOME 3.30. Stay tuned!