Well, I’ve been hard at work rearranging everything I can set my pretty little hands on. From furnishings to wirings, I’ve shifted everything around. I hardly recognize my place.

Among the interesting changes I have been moving my Linux box over from Fedora 9 to Ubuntu 8.04. It was a tough decision for me. I started using Red Hat back in 1999 and started using Fedora a few years later. So, if memory serves that was Red Hat 7 and then Fedora Core 4. At any rate that’s a large time investment for one distribution.

Fedora 9 is an excellent contender in the world of Linux. I make no complaints on that front. However, as part of my Linux advocacy I have had to select a distribution which would allow any user to succeed in a rather mundane level of computing. Ubuntu, as the name implies, is set up with the user community in mind. Certain operations which required some rather technical solutions in Fedora are profoundly simple in Ubuntu: DVD playing, proprietary codec installations, attaching to a terminal server.

It is this last section which is to be the subject of my ink today. Ubuntu had absolutely no trouble connecting to my SBS 2003 box. There were some oddities and I am going to lay them out here. Opening a terminal session is as easy as Applications → Internet → Terminal Server Client. One familiar with Windows RDP will immediately recognize the basic layout.

First oddity was that when I set up the machine I must have given my .com as my domain (rather than an intranet address). So I had to go in and make that change in my DNS. You will be able to tell if this is an issue for you rather easily. If you are able to contact the other machines on your local network using their IP addresses but not their names, you may have to make this change. Go into System → Administration → Network and click on the DNS tab (you may have to click the Unlock button and enter an appropriate password to make any changes here). If your Search Domains does not include whatever you are using for local addressing (maybe something like myintranet.local) then you’ll want to add it.

Mine keeps reverting to the .com and I’ll add something here once I sort that out. Until then you may need to simply remember this part for when your machines claim to be unreachable by machine name.

Next bit that wasn’t working for me was the copy buffer. Once I got myself connected to the terminal I found that I was not able to copy and paste across the session boundary. I knew this should be possible so I did a little searching and found that the problem relates to using RDP instead of RDPv5. This one is much easier to solve. In the Terminal Server Client dialog on the General tab change the Protocol drop-down to RDPv5. Copying and pasting should now work across your session boundary (meaning you’ll be able to copy and paste between the host and the terminal session).

This final one was really annoying. Whenever I would use “Operate in full screen mode” (found on the Display tab of the Terminal Server Client) I would get stuck in that window and could only leave that session window by disconnecting from the server. Not a viable option since I want to be able to work back and forth between my local box and my server. I did some research on this one too. Here and here are good forum posts on the subject (from which I gained some useful information).

Now, there was a lot of talk about what to do and how to get it done but I usually get real yawny when folks start chiming in just to chime in. So allow me to distill from these posts what you need to know.

In the Terminal Server Client dialog on the Performance tab choose “Enable window manager’s key bindings”. This will allow you to use your keyboard shortcuts for changing between your desktops on your Ubuntu machine. When you initially enter full screen mode you’ll want to use Ctrl-Alt-Enter once (which will fail) and then your key bindings will work (if you try to change your desktop without once using Ctrl-Alt-Enter it will drag your terminal session across your desktops instead).

My first impulse was to set “Operate in full screen mode” (Terminal Server Client dialog Display tab); however, the key bindings and minimizing the session will not work if you make that choice. This is a bug between Compiz and the way Terminal Server Client does its full screen (Compiz being the fancy visual effects Ubuntu is using). At least that’s the way it looks to me.

Instead I set my Client to “Use specified screen size” “1280 x 960 pixels”. Then I can use Ctrl-Alt-Enter to move into and back out of full screen mode without any troubles. Well, except that my monitor resolution is not 1280 x 960—it’s a drop down so I am limited to the choices it gives me—so I have a little white band at the bottom of the screen. Nonetheless this is at least workable until the Compiz, Gnome, and Ubuntu cats get this bug fixed.

(Finally, there are some advantages to choosing “Hide window manager’s decorations” on the Performance tab of the Terminal Server Client dialog, but I will let you experiment and decide for yourself if you prefer that enabled.)

It’s so nice to get that little bit more out of the Microsoft tentacular reach.