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I'm helping a friend set up Remote Desktop Connection on Linux, so that he could connect to his PC at work. But he's not that familiar with Linux and I'm trying to help him out. I tried making the whole thing as simple as possible. I've set up a shortcut on the desktop, so all it takes is to double click on the rdesktop .desktop entry and all he'd have to enter is his password.
Everything worked fine on Linux Mint, but somehow doesn't in Lubuntu. You see, when on Linux Mint, the login window was centered, on Lubuntu, it's way off to the right (seen on the image below). And that means when he logs in to his remote desktop, all windows are off-screen too, so basically a percentage of window is lost on the right side of the screen.
enter image description here

The command I'm using in my .desktop entry is this:
rdesktop -f -u test -d TEST -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD -r disk:share=/home/User/Desktop/remote [insert IP here]

So this particular command worked fine in Linux Mint.

I've also tried setting a particular resolution, so to see if it'd work in windowed mode, by removing the -f key and replacing it with -g 1680x1010 (actual resolution on monitor settings is 1680x1050, but I had to cut some height, because a tiny bit of the window would be cut off by taskbar), and that worked just fine, except... it's not full screen, and he'd like it to be full screen. I also tried to combine the -f and -g 1680x1010 switches, but the screen would still be off on full screen, everything leaning to right. I also tried setting it by percentage, -g 90%, and that didn't help either.

When I exited the full screen mode (with CTRL+ALT+ENTER) and made a screenshot of the rdesktop window, I'd actually see the cause of the problem. enter image description here

You see, rdesktop thinks that my monitor is way bigger than it actually is. Or it thinks I have multiple monitors hooked up. The screenshot's resolution came to be 2480x1025.

I hope you understood the problem here. Long story short is that I need to get Remote Desktop Connection working, as easy as possible - a double click on the desktop entry and it'd launch in full screen and all a user would do, is enter their password. He could probably live with windowed rdesktop as well, but if the same thing worked on Linux Mint, but doesn't on Lubuntu, I'm pretty sure, there's a way to get the whole thing working on Lubuntu too.

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Ehh, apparently the solution was so simple. It looks like the resolution set from the Start-menu's "Monitor settings" does not actually set the resolution to the given value. Googling around, trying different keywords, I stumbled upon this tool, named xrandr. I'm not entirely sure what xrandr is capable of doing, but one of the features is that, you can set pretty much any resolution, using this command-line tool. So, here's how I fixed the anomaly I described in the original post.

  1. To verify what's your current actual (not the one displayed in monitor settings) resolution is, type in: xrandr -q. Even though the "Monitor settings" resolution was set to 1680x1050, the output of xrandr -q told me my "current" resolution is, surprise-surprise 2480x1050: $ xrandr -q Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2480 x 1050, maximum 4096 x 4096
  2. To change the current resolution to your desired one (I wanted to use 1680x1050), using xrandr, the command goes as follows:
    $ xrandr -s 1680x1050
  3. And then I'd suggest to verify, that the current value actually changed from, in my example, from 2480x1050 to 1680x1050, using the same command given above, xrandr -q:
    $ xrandr -q Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 4096 x 4096

And now when I tried launching rdesktop everything was neat, log-in screen centered and just how it's supposed to be. Although I got it fixed, I'm not sure, why "Monitor settings" does not change the actual resolution on my mate's computer. I tried on my Lubuntu as well, and it worked - when I changed the resolution in "Monitor settings", the current value in xrandr -q also changed.
Ehh, so much hassle with just getting a program full screened :D

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