Installing rdesktop with user privileges (Red Hat EL 5.5)

Recently I came across a challenge of installing remote desktop without root privileges. Here is the information. Kudos to: http://www.nordugrid.org/documents/rpm_for_everybody.html for showing me how to do this.

In my home directory I performed these steps:
# make rpm database
mkdir rpmdb
rpmdb --initdb --dbpath ~/rpmdb/
# prepare folders
mkdir -p rpmtop/RPMS/i386
mkdir rpmtop/SRPMS
mkdir rpmtop/SOURCES
mkdir rpmtop/BUILD
mkdir rpmtop/SPECS
mkdir rpmtmp
echo `%_dbpath /home//rpmdb' | cat >> ~/.rpmmacros 
echo '%_topdir /home//rpmtop' | cat >> ~/.rpmmacros 
echo '%_tmppath /home//rpmtmp' | cat >> ~/.rpmmacros 
# copy system installed rpm list (must do this to meet dependency requirements of desired apps)
cp /var/lib/rpm/* rpmdb/.
# build rdesktop
rpmbuild --rebuild rdesktop-1.6.0-3.src.rpm
# install rdesktop
rpm -ivh rpmtop/RPMS/x86_64/rdesktop-1.6.0-3.x86_64.rpm
# since rdesktop uses keymaps by default from /usr/local, and since rdesktop isn't installed there, we will cheat by creating a link to 'user' available keymaps
ln -s usr/share/rdesktop/ ~/.rdesktop

This will give you:

/usr/bin/rdesktop

which works wonderfully well for connecting to remote windows systems.