Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Remmina Issues in Ubuntu 12.04

Remmina is the remote desktop client in Ubuntu.  It worked great under 11.10 but I'm seeing the following problems in 12.04:

A:  No Clipboard support

B:  Prompts to accept the remoted machine's certificate each time you connect.

C:  Windowed remote sessions are not displayed correctly.

Problem A should (we hope) get rectified in the repos soon, as there is a fix already but if you can't wait, you can install Jean-Louis Dupond's PPA and get an updated version from him.  Edit 6/8/12  This fix has hit the repos.  Your standard Ubuntu update should fix it.

B: can be rectified by modifying your individual connections.  Select a connection, right click and choose edit.  On the advanced tab, for security, you can choose TLS or RDP.  Save and be done.  you can click the Default button to set the defaults as currently show.

FYI  You should use TLS in every case, unless the remoted machine does not support it, as TLS is encrypted, and RDP is not.

C:  This is hard to explain, but when you start a remote connection, the remote desktop is not alligned correctly within the Remmina window.  Clicking the "resize window to fit remote resolution" button (the first on the left) will fix this., and there is a bug report here.  Not super critical, but annoying nonetheless.

These 3 problems are really disappointing, as they were all introduced in Ubuntu 12.04.  Remmina had none of these issues in 11.10.  As of right now there is no fully functional RDP client in Ubuntu, and I feel RDP support is really important if you are trying to convince people to switch from windows.  Too bad.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

have the same issues.

and another one:

windows sessions freezes sometimes...
mostly during mouse clicks when you have to confirm something in a small window.

nothing helps anymore. you have to kill the remmina process.

realy anoying.

Jim said...

I'm now seeing this same problem with the session hangs.

I'm extremely disappointed with Remmina on 12.04. I'm very close to downgrading to 11.10, as remoting computers is the most critical task on my work machine.

BOOOO!

Anonymous said...

I completely agree. Remmina under 11.10 did have some issues (~/.xsession-errors logging) but the overall user experience was excellent. Now, with the auto-resolution scaling issue, it is very frustrating. It just seems such a shame because it was close to being the definitive multi-protocol remote client for Linux. I'm still hoping that the bugs will be addressed and pushed into the repos, but there is little sign that this is going to happen soon. I suspect nothing will change until 12.10 at which point an alternative (and inferior) client may become the default Ubuntu solution.

Anonymous said...

Its 12.04 LTS version, it should just work! Being LTS.

Anonymous said...

Issues with Remmina caused me to try Remotedesktop Client 0.23 Gnome frontend for rdesktop (C) 2002-2004 Thorsten Sauter From the Ubuntu Software Center. So far it is performing better than expected with no problems. Hope this helps someone else who needed a replacement for Remmina.

Anonymous said...

Downgrade 12.04 Remmina to version that was with 11.10

I recently upgraded to 12.04 from 11.10 - well a fresh install to a new partition. I was really annoyed to find Remmina which in 11.10 really allowed me to use Ubuntu for IT admin, had become a buggy pile of shite. Random RDP disconnects, clip board totally non functional and number lock status not sync'd.

Anyway after some trial and error I managed to get the .deb packages for the version that worked on 11.10 and get them installed on 12.04.

1> Uninstall remmina, remmina-common, libfreerdp0, libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2> Find and download the following packages and install (double click the .debs), if it moans just tell it to "install anyway"

remmina-plugin-data_0.9.2-2_all.deb
remmina-plugin-rdp_0.9.2-2_amd64.deb
remmina-plugin-vnc_0.9.2-2_amd64.deb
remmina_0.9.3-2_amd64.deb
libfreerdp0_0.8.2-2build1_amd64.deb
libfreerdp-plugins-standard_0.8.2-2build1_amd64.deb

I can't remember 100% but I think this is the order I installed them in.

At this point it all seemed to work as well as my previous 11.01 setup, with the only issue being occasionally something would make "rdpclip" choke during clipboard ops and I would have to restart it on the WinXP end.

When I was done I marked the packages as on hold to prevent the update manager trying to update them with the following:

1> Get shell root access so don't need to keep typing sudo!
sudo -i
2> Use dpkg to mark packages as on hold (repeat for each of the above packages)
echo "remmina-plugin-data hold" | dpkg --set-selections

3> Use dpkg to check they are marked as on hold, following show all the remm* packages status:
dpkg --get-selections remm*

I am fairly new to Linux so there maybe a better way of dealing with this, however it worked for me and I've seen people talking about taking the whole OS back to 11.10 because of Remmina in 12.04 - so I thought I would share.

Jim said...

Final update on this.

I was never able to get this stable enough so that it didn't crash, or hang at some point.

I've switched to Gnome-RDP and have been using it daily for about a month. It works flawlessly.

Aleksandar Kostadinov said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Aleksandar Kostadinov said...

Initially I thought remmina is broken and removed it so I tried running freerdp. I got a freezed session again. So the issue must be in freerdp. I'm seeing reports in the internet it hangs when compression is enabled with -z. Now I'm trying again remmina with ssh port forwarding so ssh keeps connection to the lab and remmina takes care of RDP in the local network. Not sure how well would that work though. rdesktop seems more stable but remmina lacks a plug-in for it.

Anonymous said...

The issues with Remmina came about with the switch from rdesktop to freerdp. Not being part of the project, I can't say why they switched, but rdesktop is a near flawless RDP client, while freerdp is abysmal. The "every-single-connection" certificate prompts, major graphics corruption if accessing something like WSUS over RDP... those are completely due to freerdp and don't exist at all if you use rdesktop (which is why the older Remmina worked so well for you).

I don't know if the freerdp project will ever get it together so that you can actually connect to servers without a meaningless certificate prompt *every* *single* *time*, but it's been long enough now that I don't have much hope.