A patch for chrome remote desktop

Budgie Desktop
1

Hey y’all, not sure if anyone else uses chrome remote-
As distributed, it usually doesn’t work well (if at all) with Budgie and some other Ubuntu environments. Thought I’d share my solution here, just in case this has been irksome to anyone else. here’s the readme below, the repo is over here on Github if you’re keen.

Fully automated patching for Chrome Remote Desktop on Ubuntu Budgie.

Chrome remote desktop is fantastic, but often clashes with Xorg nuances from a variety of desktop environments in Ubuntu. This chrome-remote-desktop script extends and replaces the version automatically installed by Google in /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop. This stuff is only relevant for accessing your Ubuntu machine from elsewhere (e.g. the “server”, the client machine should not be installing anything, all it needs is a web browser).

Set up the server:

Before patching anything or pursuing other forms of delightful tomfoolery, follow the installation instructions provided by Google. Set up everything normally- install Google’s .deb download with dpkg, set up a PIN, etc.
The trouble comes when you are trying to remote in- some problems you may encounter include:

  • none of the X sessions work, each immediately closing the connection to the client
  • the remote desktop environment crashes or becomes mangled
  • odd scaling issues or flaky resolution changes

Patch it up:

# install base depends:
sudo apt-get install xbase-clients

# get this script:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jesssullivan/chrome-remote-desktop-budgie/master/chrome-remote-desktop

# behold:
python3 chrome-remote-desktop

What does this do?

We are primarily just enforcing the use of existing instances of X and correct display values as reported by your system.

  • This version keeps a persistent version itself in /usr/local/bin/ in addition updating the one executed by Chrome in /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/.
  • A mirror of this script is also maintained at /usr/local/bin/chrome-remote-desktop.github, and will let the user know if there are updates.
  • The version distributed by google is retained in /opt/ too as chrome-remote-desktop.verbatim.
  • Each of these versions are compared by md5 hash- this way our patched version of chrome-remote-desktop will always make sure it is where it should be, even after Google pushes updates and overwrites everything in /opt/.
2 Likes
2

…fwiw- just added an optional systemd service, checks to make sure everything is hunky-dory & all synced up on boot.