So occasionally I have to touch a Windows system, or use a Windows-only management tool (I’m looking at you VMware). I use the Open Source rdesktop utility to access the Windows machine using version 5.0 of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
It’s a handy utility, but I really wish it would give me an appropriate resolution based on the current resolution of my laptop’s X Windows session. There is, in fact, a command line flag to alter the geometry of the remote desktop window. However, typing in ‘rdesktop -g 1280×1024 ‘ is much more tedious than typing in ‘rdesktop ‘ on the command line interface.
So the simple solution is to put an alias in the .bashrc file, like so…
rdesktop=’rdesktop -g 1280×1024′
However, on my laptop, the max resolution without an external monitor is 1440×900. So I still have to override the setting with ‘rdesktop -g 1280×1024‘ on the command line, any time I am running without an external monitor.
Another solution would be to use awk to find a smaller resolution from xrandr, then set that resolution in my rdesktop alias.
RDESKTOP_SIZE=`xrandr | awk ‘{getline; getline; getline; print $1; exit;}’`
alias rdesktop=’rdesktop -g $RDESKTOP_SIZE’
This awk command will skip the first three lines, from the xrandr output. That is two header lines, and the maximum resolution on the following line, which we’ll skip. I’ll take the next highest resolution and set that in the variable RDESKTOP_SIZE. Finally, I’ll use the variable $RDESKTOP_SIZE with the -g switch in rdesktop to properly set my alias.
Let’s say you have two big monitors plugged into a port replicator. Perhaps you only want the rdesktop window to cover part of one screen. The following code will keep my rdesktop window smaller than one of the 1920×1200 screens on a spanned 3840×1200 resolution.
RDESKTOP_SIZE=`xrandr | awk ‘{getline; getline; getline; print $1; exit;}’`
if [ $RDESKTOP_SIZE == “3840×1200” ]; then
RDESKTOP_SIZE=”1820×1100″
fialias rdesktop=’rdesktop -g $RDESKTOP_SIZE’
In other words, if I have two monitors at 1920×1200 each, their combined resolution is reported by xrandr as 3840×1200. I want to override the detected resolution to 100 pixels less than the resolution on one screen. Therefore I set the RDESKTOP_SIZE variable to 1820×1100, before setting my rdesktop alias in .bashrc.
