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

How to install Chrome Remote Desktop remotely:

sudo apt-get install xvfb xbase-clients
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/chrome-remote-desktop_current_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i chrome-remote-desktop_current_amd64.deb

• Visit https://remotedesktop.google.com/headless and follow the prompts, then set the remote pin with the DISPLAY command in the remote machine provided by the headless authorization form, etc.

Patch it up:

# get this script:
git clone https://github.com/Jesssullivan/chrome-remote-desktop-budgie/  && cd chrome-remote-desktop-budgie

# launch, permiss:
python3 chrome-remote-desktop
sudo chmod +s /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/user-session

# add the service file to start the daemon on boot:
sudo chmod u+x addsystemd.sh && sudo ./addsystemd.sh

# or, if you'd prefer to launch the daemon manually:
sudo --user=$USER /usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/chrome-remote-desktop

If the Google Chrome browser has been installed on the remote machine too, be aware our fiddling will cause the remote machine's access page to erroneously report A problem was detected with the Chrome Remote Desktop installation on this computer. This can be ignored.

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What does this do?

We are really 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/.