Xfce Remote Desktop Debian Chrome
I am trying to install Chrome Remote Desktop and I'm reading the FAQ on how to install it, but it says nothing much AFAIK.
Install Chrome Remote Desktop from the Chrome Web Store. (Note: This step should be done on all computers you plan on using for accessing/getting access to your other devices.) After it is installed, open it. Under My Computers, press “Get Started”. Press “Enable remote connections”. It will ask you to enter a PIN.
With Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, what should be the content of the .chrome-remote-desktop-session file?
* Edit *
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- Install Xrdp Server to connect to Debian from the Windows Remote Desktop function.
I created the required .chrome-remote-desktop-session file with a single line :
Howerver, starting a remote desktiop session only result with a blank screen. I have tried searching for a solution, but none of them are up-to-date, or gives a helpful hint for a solution. I also tried gnome-session-classic, but without luck, too.
6 Answers
This answer originates from Rob Calistri's comment in François Beaufort's G+ post. Due credit to the source. If you've updated Ubuntu (or Ubuntu Gnome) recently, instead of a blank screen, you likely see just wallpaper without any panels when connecting via Chrome Remote Desktop. This modification forces Chrome Remote Desktop to use the existing X Server instead of creating new desktops.
After installing the Debian package chrome-remote-desktop_current_amd64.deb, make sure the current user is part of the chrome-remote-desktop group:
Stop Chrome Remote Desktop:
Backup the original configuration:
Edit the config file (sudo vim, gksudo gedit, etc):
Find DEFAULT_SIZES and amend to the remote desktop resolution. For example:
Set the X display number to the current display number (obtain it with echo $DISPLAY from any terminal). On Ubuntu 17.10 and lower, this is usually 0, and on Ubuntu 18.04, this is usually 1:
Comment out sections that look for additional displays:
Reuse the existing X session instead of launching a new one. Alter launch_session() by commenting out launch_x_server() and launch_x_session() and instead setting the display environment variable, so that the function definition ultimately looks like the following:
Save and exit the editor. Start Chrome Remote Desktop:
Caution: When this answer was originally written for Ubuntu (Gnome) 14.04 in February 2015, there existed an issue where Chrome Remote Desktop somehow caused deja-dup-monitor to go wild and consume all of your system memory (see launchpad bug). This made Ubuntu essentially unusable after connecting/disconnecting via Chrome Remote Desktop.
Update November 2016: The instructions have been amended based on further updates by Rob Calistri in the above-linked G+ post comments. With Ubuntu 16.04, the deja-dup-monitor bug appears to be resolved (it never exceeded 2.8 MiB of memory usage in my last test).
The chrome-remote-desktop application works just fine with linux generally and Ubuntu specifically. It however does NOT play nice with LightDM and Unity. Ubuntu Bug #1274013, and the related bug in comment #3 shed some light on this: gnome-session is broken without 3d acceleration.
To resolve this I added LXDE to my ubuntu installation on my desktop:
I still am able to use the standard Unity Desktop when accessing my desktop locally, but the I have the LXDE desktop to use via chrome-remote-desktop remotely.
Xfce Remote Desktop Debian Chrome Windows 10
This is accomplished by creating (or altering) the ~/.chrome-remote-desktop-session file to read
Then, to shutdown and restart the Chromoting service, run from terminal
Now attempt to remote in from another computer. This should start a virtual session in LXDE even if the remote computer is currently logged in under Unity/LightDM.
As far as I'm aware, Chrome remote desktop cannot be a host/server on linux/ubuntu - it can only be used as a client to view instances of remote-desktop on Mac / Windows / Chrome machines.
I've only ever used it for that use case - to connect to OSX / Windows boxes from my Ubuntu work laptop. In those instances, the viewer is just accessed by installing via the chrome extension located here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp?hl=en
Xfce Remote Desktop Debian Chrome Download
EDIT: Since the remote-desktop host feature is currently in beta, it's not accessible in the chrome-stable installation, which is why I've not seen it listed and there is no option to enable remote connections in the stable installation, as far as I can tell.
As the desktop environment on my computer is LXDE and not gnome, I am using the following:
I followed the guide found here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1649523?hl=en under the heading
Set up Chrome Remote Desktopsubheading>Enable Remote Access to Your computerminor heading >Linux
Create a file called .chrome-remote-desktop-session in your home directory. This should be a shell script that starts your preferred desktop environment. Find the correct command to start the desktop by looking in /usr/share/xsessions/ for the desktop entry.
For example, the ubuntu-2d.desktop file has the line:
The text after ‘Exec=’ is the command to start the session. It should be passed (using quotes if necessary) as a parameter to the lightdm-session script. In this case, the correct command would be:
Including a couple of links one to another thread on the subject and also linking to an article write up created for my own reference...
In my case, because I already had the session and X running, I was losing the connection after a while. Looking to the logs, it stops after 15 attempts because was already running. So I had to comment another line.
In sum, on /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop:
Set the display number to 0:
Comment:
And in my case, I also commented this:
I don't fully understand the issue but works like a charm.
@AndrewYou can use the CRD as host/server on linux. Try this:Check your xsession (lubuntu example):
And put that on the chrome-remote-desktop-session file:
After this the option to add you machine as host becomes available on CRD.
Running Lubuntu (Ubuntu 15.10)
Here is my story of how I enabled it on ubuntu 16.04 server:
- installed the remote desktop deb
- installed xorg dummy drivers
apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-input-void - added to
/etc/environment:
.
- reboot
- added group
chrome-remote-desktopand added my user to this group - added xfce:
apt-get install xfce4and
.
- enabled debug in the chrome remote desktop extension by opening its 'main.html' page and made sure everything is okay there
this works as a terminal server with separate desktop for each user with auto-resizing of the desktop as expected
protected by Community♦Mar 4 '15 at 12:09
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I'm connecting to my remote server running Xubuntu. When I log in directly to the box, all is fine - the problem appears when I connect using Chrome Remote Desktop. If I try and do anything important (e.g restart, change networks, install software) through the GUI I get a permissions error. For example trying to enable my OpenVPN connection returns:
VPN Connection FailedNot authorized to control networking
In terminal, it seems I'm logged in as my usual user. But I can't reboot (can't remember if this normally requires sudo - changing networks certainly doesn't):
foo@bar:~$ reboot
reboot: Need to be root
As soon as I sudo I can do anything through the command line - but this doesn't do me any good for all the stuff in the GUI I'd like to be able to do remotely.
I tried adding my user to netdev, but that didn't solve the problem:
foo@bar:~$ groupsfoo adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev netdev lpadmin sambashare chrome-remote-desktop
My theory is that I'm not actually logged in as my user, or that the GUI at least is being triggered by another user that doesn't have proper permissions.
How can I find out what 'user' has triggered the xfce session I'm in?
How can I give that user appropriate permissions? I know it's poor practice to add non-root users to root but I'm tempted ;)
Looked for a chrome-remote-desktop user but that doesn't seem to exist - although there is a group by that name:
foo@bar:~$ grep 'chrome-remote-desktop' /etc/group
chrome-remote-desktop:x:1001:foo
Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
1 Answer
This happens because of the way Chrome Remote Desktop works. It creates a new session which you can access remotely in parallel to the other sessions. Normally the X server/GUI runs on session 7 (you can try and change sessions with Ctrl + Alt + Fn, where n is the session number), and Chrome Remote Desktop uses a different one. So whenever you're asked to enter your password using a GUI, the window appears on the main GUI session (session 7), and there's no way to access it from Chrome Remote Desktop directly.
Fortunately, there's a bit of hacking you can do to circumvent this. As mentioned here, you could edit /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop (create a backup of this file first in case anything goes wrong):
Then comment out the while loop:
Another solution is to run applications from terminal with sudo, e.g. sudo google-chrome (not recommended).
Hopefully the team developing Chrome Remote Desktop will hear us all out and soon change this behaviour.