FreeRDP/FreeRDP — Issue #328: Detach after login
Author: ItsNannerpuss
Created: 2012-01-04 20:01:14+00:00
State: open

I've begun using xfreerdp heavily on my linux system. The biggest problem I have at the moment is that each run requires the shell for login credentials, but then subsequently stays in foreground, consuming the shell. When connecting to dozens of machines this way, it creates the nuisance of having to log in, manually interrupt the process, and manually background it, before you can connect to an additional machine (or leave dozens of shells open).

Compare this behavior to the 'rdesktop' application, which uses a GUI for login. With that product, you can just immediately launch the process in the background from the initial command line (rdesktop [op] [op] [server] &), because everything post-launch happens in the GUI.

I'm not saying a GUI is preferable, just that currently freerdp makes it cumbersome to detach the process from terminal after logging in. Ideally I think this could be solved via a flag that simply daemonizes the process once the user has passed login. When the "detach" or "background" flag is specified on startup, the process continues to ask for login credentials and certificate verification as usual, but then forks itself off and releases the terminal upon connection.