Since our school updated the servers to Server 2012, the standard install of RDesktop has problems with the pointer disappearing, or simply not connecting at all. Unfortunately, the latest version in the software centre (1.7.1) does not have the fix required to make this all work. So, I upgraded to RDesktop 1.8.3:
cd /tmp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev libssl-dev libgssglue-dev libpcsclite-dev
wget https://github.com/rdesktop/rdesktop/releases/download/v1.8.3/rdesktop-1.8.3.tar.gztar zxvf rdesktop-1.8.3.tar.gz
cd rdesktop-1.8.3
./configure
make
sudo apt-get remove rdesktop
sudo make install
... and all was right with the world again!
