OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Applications

FreeRDP - we have options!!!

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Dariusz Piatkowski:
So I thought I would summarize my experience with this particular approach to working around our platform issues, one of them being a badly out-of-date web browser.

Some of you may be aware of the excellent FreeRDP (http://os2.snc.ru/product-freerdp.html) port that Andrey Vasilkin has made available. I have been using his previous version of the RDesktop (http://os2.snc.ru/product-rdesktop.html) for a while now. When he made the FreeRDP available I jumped at it because it offered something significant: the ability to run a remote APPLICATION as if it was a local app.

Now let me detail some of the pre-requisites because this isn't one of these solutions that everyone can use. But, if you have a Winx box running on your LAN (or even WAN) you certainly could deploy this approach.

In short, if you have such a Windows installation accessible to you, you can serve a particular APPLICATION on that HOST machine. FreeRDP is the client side of the RDP solution that will allow you to effectively just RDP to that single application the host is sharing. This is the key difference between something like RDesktop, which does a whole session sharing where the whole Win Desktop is available. As much as sometimes that's the preferred way to access, at other times this introduces a significant amount of overhead.

Subsequently, with FreeRDP you can certainly be a single-click away from having access to a Firefox 'whatever version' you need that you have running on that remote HOST, and it being served up locally on your OS/2 WPS literally as if it was just another PM window.

BUT

...there is of course a caveat that comes with this.

In order to be able to serve that application on the HOST side you need to run a Win Server OS, such as 2008, etc., basically something that has the Terminal Server (Remote Desktop Services) component up and running. So what is one to do if this is not an option?

Well, there is an alternative. Take a look at Thinkstuff (https://www.thinstuff.com/products), and in particular their XP/VS Terminal Server. There are several options available as far as the licensing configuration. The lightest option is the 'Lite' configuration, and at $39.99 USD that's a pretty low-entry to a viable way of "running" (double-quotes there b/c you're NOT really running it locally, this is not ODIN, rather only serving the display) most Winx applications locally on your OS/2 box.

So how did this pan out for me?

My Windows server is a Win7 Pro 64-bit box. I installed the Lite version of the ThinStuff's 'XP/VS Terminal Server' and was able to configure a WPS object that invokes the Firefox browser on that Win7 machine and serves it out locally on my OS/2 box.

This is on a LAN (so pretty quick) and even watching YouTube videos that actually works. There are some audio issues I'm encountering, intermittend drop-outs, etc., but video and audio is already a heavy application, so the mere fact that I can get to numerous web-sites while still directly in front of my OS/2 screen is great!!!

Anyways, for what it's worth, there is an alternative some of us may be able to use.

Andi B.:
Does this setup allow the "remote application" to store data on the local (read JFS) drive? Without lan shares (without samba)?

Thinking about that I fear the answer is no. Firefox - download to local JFS drive will not work, correct?

For clarification, I've some programs running on Win in VBOX. But the data output of these Win programs I store on via shared folders on my OS/2 JFS data partition. Which is regularly backup up in difference to the partitions inside VBOX. Would be cool if I could get ride of some VBOX installations but let them run on some other Win PC remotely. But I want my important data on my local JFS partition. Not spread around over different PCs.

Doug Bissett:
Another option, that I haven't tried for a few years, is VNC. There are multiple platform versions at: https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/download/vnc/. I know that it did work, when I tried it, but I don't know if the latest will still work with our old VNC viewer. There is an updated VNC viewer at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/apps/internet/misc/vnc-wpi-20200917.zip which might be more usable.

Dariusz Piatkowski:
Hi Andi,


--- Quote from: Andi B. on September 30, 2020, 03:54:45 pm ---Does this setup allow the "remote application" to store data on the local (read JFS) drive? Without lan shares (without samba)? ...
--- End quote ---

Well, the good (hopefully?) news is that the FreeRDP client does provide for mapping of remote devices, and something like HDD certainly applies. I haven't personally tried this having been sort-of eyeballs deep ;D into making the application-level RDP confgured and tested, but I'll give this a shot within the next couple of days.

I am going to venture a guess that if the mapping does work well enough, it'll probably be more of that seamless storage type of a "warm-hole" (ha ha, sorry couldn't resist the Space Geek temptation here) connection. I'm not sure that an application like FF would be able to use that, after all, it has to start up on the HOST side first I think.

Dariusz Piatkowski:
Hey Doug,


--- Quote from: Doug Bissett on September 30, 2020, 06:35:01 pm ---Another option, that I haven't tried for a few years, is VNC. There are multiple platform versions at: https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/download/vnc/. I know that it did work, when I tried it, but I don't know if the latest will still work with our old VNC viewer. There is an updated VNC viewer at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/apps/internet/misc/vnc-wpi-20200917.zip which might be more usable.

--- End quote ---

Hmm...I've had VNC installed on my OS/2 box for a number of years now. Previously, before the RDesktop and FreeRDP was ported I was using VNC to do a full session VNC connection, but that was a FULL Desktop thing, not an application specific window mapping.

Andrey does have an updated version of VNC on his site as well (http://os2.snc.ru/product-VNC.html), I haven't tried it out yet, so I can't talk to what (if anything) has changed.

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