The Windows universe has lots of applications and often there is one application that you can't live without. If WINE can't adequately handle the app, then one of the slickest ways to handle that is to deploy a Windows Terminal Server. Administering one Windows box is alot less headache then deploying VMware on everyone's workstation.
To connect to a Windows Terminal Server from Linux use rdesktop. There has been a major release, almost a year in the making.
The new release, v1.4.0, has the following new features (taken from the announcement):
* Basic disk-, parallel-, printer- and serial-redirection
* Fix timezone-redirection
* Backing-store fixes
* Fix client-IP sent to TS
* XEmbed support for embedding rdesktop in other applications (KRDC)
* Support for setting the RDP5 experience
* Keyboard and keymap fixes
* Performance improvements
* Report disconnect-reason
* Support for RDP-compression (currently only for 8bpp)
* Support for persistent bitmap caching
* Sound-driver for SGI/Irix
The support for serial port redirection will enable us to use a Linux box with serialy connected scale and run UPS Worldship remotely on the terminal server.
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