Connect to Ubuntu from Windows via RDP

In my office, we have an Ubuntu box which is installed OWASP tools (I’ll get back with what is OWASP later. For now check https://www.owasp.org). My laptop installed Windows 7 and I wanted to remotely connect to the Ubuntu computer to test the installed software. I guess most of you use “VNC Viewer” to connect Ubuntu from the Windows.

VNC requires a separate client running on a PC. But why don’t we use existing RDP (Remote Desktop Client) which is freely come with windows instead of installing separate software? Here are the steps, how to use RDP to connect from Windows to Ubuntu.

1. To enable the RDP, you have to install the RDP server (xrdp – http://www.xrdp.org/) on Ubuntu. Login to the Ubuntu and run the following command on the terminal window

2.  Now login to the Windows PC and open the RDP client. Type the IP address and click “Connect” button

3. It will prompt the xrdp login window, and enter your Ubuntu username and password and click “OK”

4. Here you connect.

You may want to know why I used RDP instead of VNC. That is not only to stop installation overhead of separate software; here is one of the complete answers for this.

RDP is semantic. The RDP is aware of controls, fonts, and other similar graphical primitives. This means that when rendering a screen across a network, this information is used to compress the data stream significantly. For instance, if you know that this region of the screen if occupied by a button, with the color grey, then you don’t need to send an image of the button across the network, but merely information such as location of this button, size and color.

VNC is “dumb” in this respect, and largely functions by sending the actual images across the network.RDP is tightly coupled to the Windows platform, whereas VNC is available for most platforms. RDP is also seen as far more performance then VNC, due to the semantic advantage.

http://superuser.com/questions/32495/whats-the-difference-between-rdp-vs-vnc