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@wjt
Created October 1, 2020 13:49
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Chrome Remote Desktop on Endless OS 3.8 and Fedora 32

I tried to make Chrome Remote Desktop work on Endless OS 3.8 and Fedora 32, with varying degrees of failure.

Endless OS

The chrome-remote-desktop.deb package that is downloaded by the installation process depends on python3-psutil (in our repo), some other X11 thing (in our repo), and x11-session-utils which is not in our repo.

I did the following:

  • eos-dev-unlock
  • configuring the Endless APT repos which are only available to Endless employees
  • Installed x11-session-utils from Debian
  • Installed other dependencies from the Endless APT repo (perhaps the Debian Bullseye versions would also have worked)
  • Installed chrome-remote-desktop.deb

Now, I am not able to use the "remote access" feature at https://remotedesktop.google.com/access which allows logging in a new session, but I am able to use the "Remote Support" tab to generate a code, which I entered into Firefox on another machine and was able to drive my desktop remotely.

Fedora 32

Google only serves up a chrome-remote-desktop.deb, not an .rpm. There is a chrome-remote-desktop package in the Fedora repositories, which Tom Callaway, RH's Chromium maintainer, says is there precisely because Google only provides a .deb.

I tried:

  • Installed chrome-remote-desktop
  • Installed chromium
  • Installed python3-psutil
  • Browsing to <remotedesktop.google.com> in Chromium and opting to install the extension

Problems:

  • The web interface waits forever for me to install the .deb package. I can't work out what is supposed to call back to it to say that the native component is installed.
  • /usr/lib64/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop and /etc/chromium/native-messaging-hosts/chrome-remote-desktop and /etc/opt/chrome/native-messaging-hosts/chrome-remote-desktop (all the same file) have a #!/usr/bin/python2 shebang but use Python 3 syntax. (Easily fixed in a text editor.)
  • abrt popped up to say that remote-assistance-host had been killed by SIGABRT
  • After fixing the shebang, systemctl status chrome-remote-desktop@wjt.service exits immediately.
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