How to connect via remote desktop from Windows 10 to freebsd

Truculent_Freddi

Truculent_Freddi

I need to connect remotely to freebsd from under Windows so that I can work with the system and at the same time have a graphical interface for convenient work
 
Geezer said:
You cannot rpd from windows to freebsd.
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Sure you can. Just install and configure net/xrdp.

Here's a screenshot with a local fvwm session and FreeRDP connected to a remote machine running a KDE/Plasma session:
forums.freebsd.org

FreeBSD Screen Shots

I prefer Xfce and a minimalistic look. Very satisfied with the look of my FreeBSD 12.2 system :) I also like it minimal ;) GTK & Openbox theme: https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1350205/ Icon Theme: x11-themes/numix-icon-theme + x11-themes/numix-icon-theme-circle Using: x11-wm/openbox with x11/tint
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

And here the same from a Windows machine:
1620818563209.png
 
One I tend to use is ssh/x11 forwarding. I still find it faster than Xvnc and Xrdp (which uses Xvnc underneath anyway). Especially over LAN. I even use it for a few 3D simulation tools.

You can get a decent free Windows X11 server here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/
Then you can use the inbuilt Windows SSH client (or putty/plink that VcXsrv provides).
 
debguy said:
OpenGL is still _not_ easily transported and isn't something people are doing (not using Wayland or XCB anyhow).
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It is a little disappointing that the industry has dropped the ball on this. And to be fair, Vulkan's design doesn't really lend as well to this as OpenGL did.

However it does open up potential business opportunities for those relatively few companies who really do need remote graphics. We have a general offering for that: http://thamessoftware.co.uk/hydra.html. Mostly developed because it interested us personally rather than some great monetization opportunity haha.

That said, computers are getting so fast (for software rendering) and networks are getting fast (for streaming a rasterized image) that I can half understand why there is discontinued interest in this design. Even if it does feel wasteful.
 
I'm using [ports]deskutils/anydesk[/ports] to access windows clients and some FreeBSD hosts from my FreeBSD workstations. It also works the other way around (windows -> freebsd). You just have to set a password for unattended remote access, then you don't need to manually accept the incoming connection on the remote host.

The port sometimes lacks behind the official release, but you can just download the prebuilt binary from anydesk.com and run it.
 
kpedersen said:
I still find it faster than Xvnc and Xrdp (which uses Xvnc underneath anyway)
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Xrdp has the option of RDP integrated into the X server using x11-drivers/xorgxrdp. This should perform quite nice, but unfortunately, it doesn't work on my machine (segfaults, PR 238736…) :'‑( Still, Xvnc works "good enough" for most applications here.

Geezer said:
What a re the pros and cons of X11rdp over VNC?
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I think RDP is conceptually quite nice, as it provides session start with login, but also transferring a session to a different client or even letting it run disconnected. OTOH, it doesn't provide accessing the same session from two clients simultaneously.

IMHO, it's nice that the client comes with the Windows base system.
 
Geezer said:
It seems ironic that you can get the RDP client and server from the packages on freebsd, but on windows (ordinary version) you only get the client.
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That's not true. Every Windows version I've seen so far includes an RDP service as well (but you have to explicitly activate it).

What's unfortunately true is that Windows has artificial limitations on the number of sessions that can run in parallel: Only a single one on the "desktop" editions (means you're either logged in locally or via RDP), only two on "server" editions. If you want more, you need a server version and install a feature that requires extra licensing…

Of course, there are ways around that by patching, but don't tell :cool:

(edit: ok, "every Windows version" since RDP was available at all of course. There's no such thing in Win95 and older, hehe)
 
Ah great. I never used a "home edition" (for other reasons, you can't even add it to a domain). Didn't know it was crippled regarding RDP as well ;)
 
I've got a pro edition in bhyve and rdp into it.

The old desktop with the home version does not get much use now, but is useful for the brother printer/scanner.
 
Wow, that seems like a bit of a regression. I could have sworn Windows XP and 7 (incl Home Edition) allowed that for one user. That said, I think Windows 7 Pro only allows one user connected at a time so they might have reduced functionality even more for Home.
 
kpedersen said:
Wow, that seems like a bit of a regression. I could have sworn Windows XP and 7 (incl Home Edition) allowed that for one user.
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Never used any home edition, so I don't know, but if that's the case – sure, you gotta sell your "professional" editions somehow ;) Artificial crippling is the way to go…
kpedersen said:
That said, I think Windows 7 Pro only allows one user connected at a time
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See above ;) Even the server versions have a limitation, but they allow two sessions. For anything else, you're supposed to buy additional licenses…

Thanks for free software, no such issue with e.g. xrdp and samba ;)
 
Zirias said:
Never used any home edition, so I don't know, but if that's the case – sure, you gotta sell your "professional" editions somehow ;) Artificial crippling is the way to go…
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Hah yeah. Rather than add valuable features (involving paying developers, testing, project management, etc), you can just take existing features away and hold them ransome ;)

I keep forgetting how impossibly sleazy and tacky commercial operating systems / software in general is.
 
One thing about this thread surprised me to no end: Xorg long had the capacity to do X11 forwarding. When I was in college back before 2005, I could log into one Linux machine 1, SSH into the machine right next to me (machine 2), and run machine 2's locally installed kwrite on my machine 1, no RDP or anything special required. on Windows, you can use MobaXterm to do the same thing, and it doesn't matter if you have Home edition or not.

I guess it pays to pay attention to the direction of the connections being made - this thread says FROM windows TO freebsd. Most of the posts were focused on doing it the other way around. Sigh.
 
astyle said:
I guess it pays to pay attention to the direction of the connections being made - this thread says FROM windows TO freebsd. Most of the posts were focused on doing it the other way around. Sigh.
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Yeah I had to check my solution again but I seem to have gotten it right. ;)

VcXsrv running on Windows -> SSH -> FreeBSD

I was so hoping Microsoft's WSL layer was going to get a native inbuilt X11 server but they went with some ad-hoc Wayland mess instead (probably to avoid having to play nicely with the rest of the industry).

You could also host a web VNC client on the FreeBSD install to avoid having to install anything on the Windows side. We actually do similar in one of our products.
 
astyle said:
One thing about this thread surprised me to no end: Xorg long had the capacity to do X11 forwarding. When I was in college back before 2005, I could log into one Linux machine 1, SSH into the machine right next to me (machine 2), and run machine 2's locally installed kwrite on my machine 1, no RDP or anything special required. on Windows, you can use MobaXterm to do the same thing, and it doesn't matter if you have Home edition or not.
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I still don't see where the actual surprise is? Just the fact that you tunnel X11 through SSH should tell you something … why is it necessary? Of course, because the X11 concept is lacking in terms of authorization! Furthermore, X11 isn't really efficient: it requires quite some bandwidth to work acceptably. It's also lacking any way to switch terminals, you can't direct a running X11 client to a different X11 server without terminating it. Let alone "detaching".

RDP isn't the "holy grail", but it's far more capable than X11. Don't get me wrong, the "network transparency" design of X windows definitely was a good idea. But the implementation is way behind of what you'd expect nowadays. From that point of view, I can even understand how a project like "Wayland" came to be.
 
Zirias said:
Of course, because the X11 concept is lacking in terms of authorization! Furthermore, X11 isn't really efficient: it requires quite some bandwidth to work acceptably.
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Yeah I wouldn't like to expose an XDMCP or X server to the internet. There is the xauth magic number stuff which is probably not easy to bypass but you would still be open to DDOS.

In my personal experiments, the bandwidth is not really the issue, it is the constant back and forth between client and server (especially when using poorly network optimized GUI toolkits from 2005 onwards). Latency across a LAN is pretty good (actually for a VM or LAN, I don't think X11 can be matched in terms of performance). But internet you want to at least shovel it through SSH (possibly with the -c compression option).
 
Well, my experience is different. Of course, on the LAN, there's no issue. But WAN? For a long time, I had one of these 16MBit DSL lines (asymmetric, with upstream only a fraction of it, probably 1MBit or something like this). X11 wasn't usable. RDP was.

Anyways, the lack of switching terminals is already a showstopper for me with plain X11 over network.
 
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