Full screen WinXP in VMware 3

My preferred environment is FreeBSD with the Ion3 window manager; however, for my job I need to run MS Windows so I installed vmware3 from ports and made a WinXP Pro virtual machine. If you have used vmware on FreeBSD before, you may have had trouble getting it to work full-screen. There may be a solution, but I have not looked hard enough to find it yet. I came up with a workaround, though. Use rdesktop to connect through the virtual network interface and a run a full-screen RDP session!

I got the inspiration from doing the same thing with my office computer. Then I thought, why not connect to the virtual machine the same way? So I tried "rdesktop -a 24 -g 1280x1024 -D -K vmhostname" and it worked! Of course, I had to add an entry in my hosts file to map vmhostname to the I.P. address of the virtual machine and turn on Remote Desktop in Windows.

If you are not familiar with rdesktop, you can install it using ports. It is found at net/rdesktop. The "-a 24" specifies 24-bit color. The "-g 1280x1024" specifies the resolution of the session. The "-D" hides the the window manager's decorations. The "-K" keeps the window manager's keybindings so I can easily switch back and forth from Windows to FreeBSD. See the man page for other options.

The best part is that since it communicates through the virtual network connection, I can connect to the virtual machine without a network connection.

Edit: For windows, the guest OS will have to have to be Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Pro, or Windows Server 2003 in order to be able to connect to it using RDP. Other OSes have other ways of using the GUI remotely (FreeNX, VNC, Citrix, etc).

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