Remote Desktop Connection to Windows 7 PC from Ubuntu 11.04 Natty or 10.10 or 10.04

You can connect to a Windows 7 or any windows machine  from your Linux Box (Ubuntu, Fedora etc.) with a built in RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) server capability. One has to be running at least a Professional version (Ultimate and Media Center versions are fine too) of windows. Enable Remote desktop connection capability on your target windows machine. For this goto Control Panel and then to System Properties and enable Remote Desktop Connection by ticking allow connection from computers running any version of remote desktop.

Command-line Approach

In your linux machine install rdesktop by doing this:

sudo apt-get install rdesktop (or yum install rdesktop) 

After this you are ready to connect to a windows machine using RDP

 rdesktop -uUSERNAME -dHOSTNAME HOSTIP -gWxH -a16 -xb -rsound:remote

The USERNAME corresponds to your Windows 7 login name, HOSTNAME is the computer’s network name and HOSTIP is your Windows machine ip address, W and H are the width and height in pixels of your desired Remote desktop screen, 16 is for 16 bit color and -xb is for broadband connection, you can use -xl if you are accessing in lan. If you want to keep the sound to stay on the remote computer then use -rsound:remote (use local or off for bringing it to local computer or turning it off at the remote computer respectively). This should work for Fedora and any other linux distribution as well, once executed you would be asked to enter your password to login.

GUI Based Approach

If you prefer using GUI based tools then you can use the terminal server client to connect via RDP which comes by default with most Linux distributions and should be available in Applications > Internet menu, if not then you can install it by

sudo apt-get install tsclient (or yum install tsclient)