FreeRDP and Remmina integration in Precise

We would like to replace Vinagre, tsclient and rdesktop with Remmina and FreeRDP in 12.04. tsclient is a UI front-end for rdesktop. Vinagre is a UI front-end for VNC and SSH. Remmina is a UI front-end for FreeRDP, and supports RDP, VNC, NX, XDMCP and SSH.

Rationale

The reasons for this change are:

• rdesktop is not actively maintained; on the other hand, FreeRDP has a very active development community, implements more features than rdesktop (Network Level Authentication, Remote Application Integrated Locally, etc) including some features that result in better performance (GDI rendering, RemoteFX, SSE2 and NEON optimization).
• FreeRDP was considered for inclusion in 11.04. This was vetoed for a security reason (there was no certificate checking at the time). This feature has now been committed in the trunk, so we are good on this front.
• Remmina is a better UI frontend than Vinagre, and is well integrated with FreeRDP. Remmina supports all the features that Vinagre does. (if anyone is aware of any missing functionality, please comment on this page)

Issues

The main issues are:

• risk: FreeRDP v1.0 is currently targeted for November and there is a risk it might slip.

• there might be regressions compared to rdesktop (https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/issues?milestone=1&state=open)

• Remmina needs to be updated to support FreeRDP v1.0 as opposed to FreeRDP v0.82
• some works needs to be done to add certificate management functionality to Remmina