Apache Guacamole

Guacamole 0.8.3 Released. The latest version of Guacamole, 0.8.3, has been released. This release features two new supported methods of authentication (LDAP and "noauth"), improved rendering performance, and connection grouping and load balancing. ... [More] This release also marks our initial transition to the "org.glyptodon.guacamole" package and groupId for Guacamole's Java classes. Authentication providers have been left alone for the sake of compatibility, but any developers wanting to upgrade custom authentication to the latest will need to also change the groupId in their pom.xml. LDAP Support Guacamole has had partially-official support for LDAP for some time, but it was never released due to lack of documentation. This documentation is now written, and the LDAP support is officially released and available from the main site. With the LDAP support installed, Guacamole users and connections can be maintained entirely within an LDAP directory. Connection Grouping and Balancing Connections can now be grouped hierarcically for organizational purposes, or combined into a balancing group with acts as a connection, distributing load across its underlying connections. Currently, grouping and balancing is only supported by the MySQL authentication extension. Stable PPA for Ubuntu Users By popular demand, we have created a PPA for stable Guacamole releases. New packages are uploaded to this PPA whenever packages are submitted to Debian and Ubuntu for review. Improved Rendering Performance Guacamole used to render updates as soon as they were received on the client side. This is actually not as efficient as delaying rendering until a logical frame has been completed. The client now buffers received updates until signaled to flush. This leads to cleaner-looking updates in all supported protocols, and generally better performance. SSL Support for guacd SSL can now be enabled for connections between the web application and guacd. Enabling SSL requires a certificate and private key, and causes all Guacamole Protocol traffic through guacd to be encrypted. Adoption of the NoAuth Extension Laurent Meunier has been maintaining the "noauth" extension, providing a means for users to disable Guacamole's authentication entirely. This extension has been officially adopted upstream, and is now available for download from the project website. Authentication API Changes With the new connection grouping and balancing support, there have been several changes to the authentication API that will affect authentication provider implementations when upgrading to the latest upstream code. The UserContext object no longer simply returns a set of connections, but rather the root connection group. This root connection group provides the set of connections that the UserContext used to provide directly. The SimpleAuthenticationProvider and related classes have also been made mutable. Implementations which extend these classes rather than implementing the full authentication stack from scratch should now have a bit more flexibility. org.glyptodon.guacamole We have officially migrated to the org.glyptodon.guacamole package for all Java source (except for authentication providers). Authentication providers have not been migrated for the sake of compatibility, so no changes need to be made to guacamole.properties. This change will affect downstream developers when upgrading, however. Simply substituting "org.glyptodon.guacamole" for "net.sourceforge.guacamole" within your source is sufficient. Migration to Maven central Once the central repository completes its sync, the Guacamole APIs should now be available from the Maven central repository. There is no longer any need to specify the Guacamole repository within pom.xml files when developing against the Guacamole APIs. [Less]

Guacamole 0.8.2 Released. The latest version of Guacamole, 0.8.2, has been released. This release features support for printing in RDP, several bug fixes, and support for VNC repeaters (like that provided by UltraVNC). This release also marks the ... [More] first release after the transition away from per-release binary packaging and complex repositories. We now only have two git repositories: guacamole-server (the native components) and guacamole-client (the web application). Printing Support Documents can now be printed through Guacamole when using RDP. Documents printed over RDP are downloaded directly into the user's browser as PDFs, where they can be viewed/downloaded/printed/etc. as desired. GhostScript must be installed on the server running guacd for printing to work. Printing is enabled by setting the "enable-printing" parameter to "true" for connections that should have printing support. Each user with printing enabled will see their own printer named "Guacamole" within the RDP session. Printing to this printer will print to the corresponding user's browser. Windows' security model prevents users from seeing or using other users' printers. The only exception to this is the local administrator of the system, who has access to see all devices by default, including any connected printers. RDP Rendering Bug Last release included a bug that caused text to render improperly. Users would see large rectangles stretching across the screen, and text overlapping and persisting in areas it is not expected. This is now fixed. Sound Stability Bug Previous releases suffered from random disconnects when sound played over RDP connections. Thanks to better handling of threading, this should now be fixed. VNC Repeater Support VNC connections can now be made through repeaters like that provided by UltraVNC. Two new parameters are available that facilitate this: "dest-host" (the destination host) and "dest-port" (the destination port). If these parameters are specified, the server given with the "hostname" and "port" parameters must be a VNC repeater, while "dest-host" and "dest-port" specify the final VNC server. Repeater support requires a recent version of libvncclient. Unicode Connections Previous releases included a bug that prevented Unicode characters from being included in the names of connections and in their parameters. This is now fixed, but you may have to additionally configure your servlet container (likely Tomcat) to interpret URIs as UTF-8. New Release Structure Maintaining binary packages for all active versions of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora has been cumbersome and has delayed several past releases. We are now relying on downstream maintainers to build packages for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, and others, such that the Guacamole team can focus on maintaining the source. To this end, we've restructured our repositories (see the past news post: Simplification and Migration to GitHub). This will make it easier for users to compile Guacamole from source in order to get the latest version, and easier for maintainers to build binary packages when possible. A binary build of the web application portion of Guacamole (guacamole.war) will still be built, as it is cross-platform. [Less]

Simplification and Migration to GitHub Because having each subproject in its own repository has grown too complex for both users and packaging (not to mention maintenance), we've combined all projects into two repositories, and we've taken the ... [More] opportunity to also migrate our repositories to GitHub: guacamole-server https://github.com/glyptodon/guacamole-server The guacamole-server repository contains all native components that form the Guacamole proxy and all upstream protocol support plugins. Building guacamole-server builds guacd, libguac, and libguac-client-*, automatically building whichever protocol support plugins you have the proper libraries for. guacamole-client https://github.com/glyptodon/guacamole-client The guacamole-client repository contains all components that make up the web application, the core Java and JavaScript APIs, and thus the Guacamole client. Building guacamole-client (with Maven) builds guacamole, guacamole-common, guacamole-common-js, and guacamole-ext. The MySQL authentication (guacamole-auth-mysql) is also in this repository, but must be built manually. The old repositories will remain open, but future development will only occur on these two. We will be transitioning our other services (like Trac) to the new repositories gradually. Overall, this should make building Guacamole from source MUCH easier, and will allow us to let downstream distributions handle packaging of Guacamole, while we focus the documentation on development, configuration, tutorials, compiling Guacamole from source for those that always want the latest. [Less]

Guacamole 0.8.1 Released. The latest version of Guacamole, 0.8.1, has been released. This release features SSH support, improved support for non-US keyboards, and various fixes that improve stability under Firefox and improve the performance and ... [More] stability of RDP connections. SSH Support Just as Guacamole supports VNC and RDP, Guacamole now supports SSH. While Guacamole is normally a graphics-oriented protocol, at its lowest level, it's simply a remote display. Taking advantage of this, Guacamole now supports SSH by implementing a terminal emulator server-side. The only difference between this terminal emulator and another (xterm, for example) is that it renders to a remote display (the Guacamole client) rather than a local display. Common terminal operations like scrolling and rendering text are highly optimized in Guacamole's SSH support compared to simply using a terminal program in VNC or RDP. RDP Improvements A problem plaguing Firefox users of Guacamole and RDP that caused frequent disconnects was discovered to be a JavaScript error and has been fixed. We've also fixed an operation used by Excel (and several other programs) that was previously only partially implemented. The cursor in Excel and other applications will now render correctly, and performance is mildly improved. VNC Bug Fix A bug in the clipboard handling of Guacamole's VNC support has been fixed. The bug caused disconnects if characters were copied that weren't part of ISO-8859-1 (the only supported encoding of VNC). Non-US Keyboard Support Previous Guacamole releases had issues supporting the AltGr key. This has been fixed. Additionally, the RDP support now has a parameter for specifying the server-side keyboard layout. If your RDP server has a non-US layout, you need to use this option to ensure that clients' keystrokes are properly translated to the layout of your server. Guacamole's client is keyboard-layout independent, but the RDP protocol is not. Admin Interface Checkbox Bug Last release included a bug that prevented checkbox parameters from saving correctly in the administration interface. This affected users using the new MySQL authentication. This is now fixed. [Less]

Authentication Regression Patch for 0.8.0 Due to an authentication regression in the 0.8.0 release, we've repackaged everything and re-released 0.8.0 with the regression fixed. If you downloaded 0.8.0 before this announcement, please re-download and ... [More] try again. The regression affected the default authentication mechanism (user-mapping.xml). The regression did not affect the new MySQL authentication mechanism. [Less]

Guacamole 0.8.0 Released The latest Guacamole, version 0.8.0, has been released. This release features major revisions to the authentication API, and an officially-supported MySQL authentication backend that provides additional features, such as the ... [More] ability to manage users and connections through the web interface. This release also includes minor bug fixes and enhancements for VNC and RDP support. Admin Interface The authentication API within Guacamole has been redone, allowing authentication providers to expose means of adding/updating/removing users and connections. When this support is present, Guacamole automatically displays an administrative interface for users with admin rights. See the admin interface documentation in the User's Guide for details. MySQL Authentication We've written a MySQL-backed authentication provider and created documentation for using it. This is the first officially-supported extension for Guacamole. Instructions for using the MySQL authentication are provided in the User's Guide. Using the MySQL authentication allows users and connections to be dynamically created and administered within Guacamole's web interface. libguac-client-vnc 0.7.1 The color depth of connections can now be specified in the connection parameters, and a clipboard bug that caused the connection to close when non-latin characters were copied has been fixed. If you were having difficult copying text before whenever that text contained umlauts or characters not present in English, you should upgrade to get this fix. libguac-client-rdp 0.7.3 A rendering issue that caused the display to appear skewed or distorted particularly on mobile devices has been fixed. The root cause was that Windows' RDP only supports resolutions whose widths are multiples of 4. Other resolutions are accepted, but lead to graphical issues. The Debian/Ubuntu packaging has also been updated, fixing the sound problems on recent releases of Ubuntu and Debian. In the last release, sound was broken due to a key file being placed in the wrong directory. [Less]

Guacamole version 0.7.2 has been released. This release contains updates to the main web application and to RDP support, as well as improved installation documentation and tutorials in the user's guide (http://guac-dev.org/doc/gug/). A couple bugs in ... [More] the way user-mapping.xml is parsed have been fixed (tickets #171 and #216). If you have been having issues with connections inexplicably not working even though all values are correct, updating may solve the problem. Support for console connections has been added to libguac-client-rdp. The two new parameters required to enable this functionality are now documented in the user's guide: "console" and "console-audio" (http://guac-dev.org/doc/gug/rdp-support.html#rdp-parameters). We've also added builds for more Linux distributions. Ubuntu 12.10, Fedora 18, and Debian Wheezy (testing) now all have official builds for download from SourceForge and from the Guacamole website: http://guac-dev.org/ [Less]

Guacamole version 0.7.2 has been released.This release contains updates to the main web application and to RDP support, as well as improved installation documentation and tutorials in the user's guide (http://guac-dev.org/doc/gug/).

Guacamole 0.7.1 has been released.This release is a minor bugfix release, with the only major bug related to Debian packaging.

Guacamole 0.7.1 has been released. This release is a minor bugfix release, with the only major bug related to Debian packaging. All packages within the 0.7.1 bundles are the same as 0.7.0 except for libguac-client-rdp, which contains a minor bugfix ... [More] , and guacd, which contains a packaging fix on Debian. If you are using a Debian distribution (including Ubuntu) and are having trouble with Guacamole working after a reboot, release 0.7.1 fixes a packaging error in guacd that caused the daemon to fail to start after the system was rebooted. libguac-client-rdp was also updated to fix an issue that caused the text cursor in the login screen of Xrdp to not render. Unlike the guacd bugfix, this problem was not specific to Debian, and packages have been updated for all supported distributions. More information on these issues is available on Trac: http://guac-dev.org/trac/ticket/236 http://guac-dev.org/trac/ticket/238 [Less]