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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T08:56:08+00:00

At work, I have a desktop computer running Ubuntu 11.04 with VirtualBox installed. I

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At work, I have a desktop computer running Ubuntu 11.04 with VirtualBox installed. I want to run a Red Hat virtual machine (guest) on the work desktop computer (host).

On my laptop at home, I ssh’ed into the desktop to start the VM using

VBoxHeadless --startvm centos_54_64

Then I tried to access the virtual machine using rdesktop but I keep getting an error!

rdesktop -a 16 -N host_ip:3389
Autoselected keyboard map en-us
ERROR: host_ip: unable to connect

The virtual machine is graphic-less. There’s only a terminal. Here’s the relevant information on my virtual machine:

NIC 1: MAC: 080027BBCE0F, Attachment: Bridged Interface 'eth0', Cable connected: on, Trace: off (file: none), Type: 82540EM, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0, Promisc Policy: deny
NIC 2: disabled
NIC 3: disabled
NIC 4: disabled
NIC 5: disabled
NIC 6: disabled
NIC 7: disabled
NIC 8: disabled
VRDE:  enabled (Address 0.0.0.0, Ports 3389, MultiConn: off, ReuseSingleConn: off, Authentication type: null)

Does anyone know what the problem is?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I did it! Woot!

    You need to install the extension pack for this to work! I misunderstood the documentation.

    The base install of VirtualBox only gives you the VRDE (VirtualBox Remote Desktop Extension) which by itself is just an interface.

    The extension pack gives you Oracle’s implementation of this interface in the form of VRDP which is backwards compatible with RDP which lets you use rdesktop!

    All the acronyms had me confused. Anyway, hope this helps!

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