FreeRDP - The Free Remote Desktop Client for Linux

RDP stands for Remote Desktop Connection. It is a way to connect to Windows desktop/server. Default port is 3389. If you use Linux, there are 2 client programs: 

1. rdekstop is the old client. Support Windows XP,2000,NT,Windows Server 2012 R2.

2. freerdp resumes the work of rdesktop and support new MS authentication for remote desktop.

To connect to Windows, following is the example: 

xfreerdp -u login -p password 192.168.0.5

There are many other options. Just run xfreerdp -h to see them.

mplayer-gui error : Error in skin config file

After installing mplayer-gui package, I can't start it.

$ gmplayer

MPlayer 1.1-4.8 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team

mplayer: could not connect to socket

mplayer: No such file or directory

Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Error in skin config file on line 6: PNG read error in /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default/main

Config file processing error with skin 'default'

After googling a bit, I found out that it was due to the png files in dir /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default. This is the default skin directory. To fix this error, I have to install ImageMagick package because I want to use the convert program to convert all of the png files to format png24. Thus,

cd /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default; for FILE in *.png ; do sudo convert $FILE -define png:format=png24 $FILE ; done

Rerun gmplayer and all should be fine.

Have fun!

UPDATE (02-10-2017)

It doesn't work on Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial) but there's a workaround here.

You can update your system with unsupported packages from this untrusted PPA by adding ppa:mc3man/mplay-skins to your system's Software Sources. (Read about installing) 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/mplay-skins
sudo apt-get update 

Now just upgrade the related package by running:

sudo apt-get upgrade 

Have fun!