Its development started back in 2009 as a fork of the rdesktop program. FreeRDPįreeRDP is one of the most famous open source solutions when it comes to remote desktop. Rdesktop is released under the GPL license. You can find it in your distribution’s official repositories or download it along with the source code from GitHub. The latest release is less than one month old. Īs you can see, Rdesktop will work using the server-client concept, and you will need to use your localhost at 192.168.1.1 to make it work. Copyright (C) 1999-2011 Matthew Chapman et al. Rdesktop: A Remote Desktop Protocol client. Rdesktop is a command line application, so you have to run the command line and launch it with the host IP address you want in order for it to open a just-enough window to display the remote desktop’s interface for you: rdesktop Simply because it doesn’t come with a user interface. Rdesktop is ultra lightweight Less than 500KB in download size. He even published a research paper about it in 2004. The developer of the program at the time reveres-engineered the RDP protocol to create Rdesktop, and made it open source. Rdesktop‘s development started back in 2001, when Microsoft started to push its new RDP protocol in its operating systems and there was no open source implementation for that protocol back then. This is an open source program to connect to Windows hosts using the RDP protocol. List of Open Source Remote Desktop Software TigerVNC In this article, we list 5 of those open source remote desktop programs. But there are many other open source alternatives to TeamViewer that you can use.

In general, people are using the proprietary TeamViewer program to do that.

Now, away from protocols, you’ll of course need a program to access the remote desktop. There are many famous remote desktop protocols, such as RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) which is a proprietary protocol designed by Microsoft and implemented in its Windows operating system, and the VNC (Virtual Network Computing) protocol, which is a free and open source protocol to do the same task, and you can additionally connect to the remote host via SSH, NX protocols and others. A remote desktop protocol is a way of transferring the instructions from one computer to another so that you can graphically control the other system. List of Open Source Remote Desktop Softwareįirst, you should know that in order for two machines to communicate together, they need what’s known as a “protocol”.

Best free remote desktop manager