Watch out OS X users, Royal TSX V0.5.5.1 is out and brings a new key feature and several improvements to the FreeRDP & iTerm Terminal Plugins!

Command Tasks

We’re proud to announce that, with Version 0.5.5.1, Royal TSX now also supports Command Tasks. Just like Royal TS (for Windows).

Command Tasks can be used for a variety of tasks like pinging a server or establishing VPN connections. They are executed from within a terminal which means that everything you can run from a terminal session can be used as a task from within Royal TSX.

By using replacement tokens you can even inject values from connections into command line arguments which makes it possible to create just one ping task, but use it with any connection.

Here’s how a ping task configuration looks like in Royal TSX:

As you can see, I’m passing in the replacement token $URI$ which will be resolved to the selected connection’s computer name when executed.
The flyout button to the right of each text field allows you to browse trough the list of available tokens and insert them.

The working directory might come in handy when you create tasks that access files or launch applications in specific directories.

You might be wondering what the tab bar items “OS X” and “Windows” are for. Well, because OS X and Windows don’t share the same commands or command arguments in many cases, we’ve decided to separate the configuration for the two platforms. So a task configuration for OS X, will only be executed on OS X and a task configuration for Windows will be executed on – you guessed it – Windows.

You can also assign command tasks to be executed before a connection is established and after a connection is closed. Those assignments are called “Connect Task” and “Disconnect Task”.

Check out the following screenshot for a common use case:

In this example I’m starting a VPN connection before the actual connection is established. There’s also a corresponding Disconnect Task that will take care of closing the VPN connection. “Wait for completion” means that the connection will not be executed before the task has finished.

You can use the following parameters to start a VPN connection:

Command: osascript Arguments: -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'tell current location of network preferences' -e 'set VPN to service "VPN CONNECTION NAME"' -e 'if exists VPN then connect VPN' -e 'end tell' -e 'end tell'; sleep 5

And to stop the VPN connection:

Command: osascript Arguments: -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'tell current location of network preferences' -e 'set VPN to service "VPN CONNECTION NAME"' -e 'if exists VPN then disconnect VPN' -e 'end tell' -e 'end tell'

Replace VPN CONNECTION NAME with the name of the VPN connection you want to start/stop.

As you can see, this task uses AppleScript to start/stop VPN connections, so any program that is scriptable can also be managed from Royal TSX by using Command Tasks.

FreeRDP Plugin

In this release of the FreeRDP plugin, “Smart Sizing” was added as a resize mode option.

iTerm Terminal Plugin

The iTerm plugin has gained options to show the history after disconnecting (was the default until this release) and the maximum number of lines to show.

You can now also change the font, character/line spacing and enable/disable Antialiasing of text.

Contact

If you experience issues or want to share your thoughts, please use our Forum or contact us using the contact form.