Chrome Remote Desktop

I have installed the package chrome-remote-desktop, but every time I try and use Chrome Remote Desktop the website still says that I need to install a .deb package.

Normally I would confirm that Chrome Remote Desktop is installed correctly by running the crd command, but that does not appear to have been installed.

How do i get this working? I have never had these issues on other Linux distributions, and our support team needs CRD so they can support my machine. Does this just not work with Fedora?

Here are the system details:
System:
Host: fedora Kernel: 6.5.8-200.fc38.x86_64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 Console: pty pts/1
Distro: Fedora release 38 (Thirty Eight)
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 21CH001RAU v: ThinkPad T16 Gen 1
serial:
Mobo: LENOVO model: 21CH001RAU v: SDK0T76538 WIN serial: UEFI: LENOVO
v: R23ET65W (1.35 ) date: 03/21/2023
Battery:
ID-1: BAT0 charge: 46.3 Wh (88.9%) condition: 52.1/52.5 Wh (99.2%)
CPU:
Info: 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with Radeon Graphics [MT MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 1441
min/max: 400/4768
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD Rembrandt [Radeon 680M] driver: amdgpu v: kernel
Device-2: Apple iSight in LED Cinema Display driver: uvcvideo type: USB
Device-3: Bison Integrated RGB Camera driver: uvcvideo type: USB
Display: server: X.org v: 1.20.14 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.9 driver: X: loaded: amdgpu
unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa dri: radeonsi gpu: amdgpu tty: 198x43 resolution: 1: 2560x1440
2: 1920x1200
API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: radeonsi,swrast platforms: surfaceless,device
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet driver: r8169
Device-2: Qualcomm QCNFA765 Wireless Network Adapter driver: ath11k_pci
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 476.94 GiB used: 110.38 GiB (23.1%)
Info:
Processes: 430 Uptime: 37m Memory: total: 16 GiB note: est. available: 14.38 GiB
used: 4.34 GiB (30.2%) Init: systemd target: graphical (5) Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.30

Where did you get chrome-remote-desktop from? That package was built from chromium in Fedora, but it was disabled circa v108 and never made it into F38. It looks like it’s broken due to changes on Google’s end. You now need to use an official build, but Google doesn’t make an RPM version. I hate to suggest using alien, but it’s either that or manually replicating the AUR pkgbuild.

Is an alternative remote desktop system out of the question?

Also, I’ve only used chrome remote desktop in the other direction so I was surprised to discover that the linux version doesn’t support mirroring‽ Less surprisingly, it doesn’t support Wayland, but that kind of cancels out with the other issue.

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I have tried Alien:

======================================================================================================================================================================================================
 Package                                                Architecture                            Version                                           Repository                                     Size
======================================================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 chrome-remote-desktop                                  x86_64                                  118.0.5993.9-2                                    @commandline                                   18 M

Transaction Summary
======================================================================================================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Total size: 18 M
Installed size: 49 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Error: Transaction test error:
  file /lib from install of chrome-remote-desktop-118.0.5993.9-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.18-3.fc38.x86_64
  file /usr/lib from install of chrome-remote-desktop-118.0.5993.9-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.18-3.fc38.x86_64

What remote desktop solutions can you recommend for KDE? krfb/VNC is slow, unreliable and does not survive hibernate/sleep. Everything else is commercial, as far as I can tell.

I really don’t understand why this isn’t being addressed. It seems pretty clear that while Google have made upstream changes the changes aren’t insurmountable because Arch and the baby Archs support it flawlessly.

Fedora can’t/won’t ship repackaged binaries from Google. That would have to fall to a third-party repo like RPM Fusion.

I understand the theory, but I see a couple of issues:

  1. The command sudo dnf install chrome-remote-desktop works on a clean install of Fedora 38. It comes from the Updates repo. If it is known not to work, then why publish it at all?

  2. How did it work in the past? It seems pretty clear that at some point it did work, and therefore there was a work-around for the closed source binaries.

Let’s assume it doesn’t work. What do I use instead? Is there an alternative Open Source option that takes care of dialling home and NAT traversal? KRFB is unusable.

It does something, but it doesn’t install chrome-remote-desktop. Instead it installs chromium-common, which Provides and Obsoletes chrome-remote-desktop. This was apparently an attempt to make sure chrome-remote-desktop was removed on upgrades after being disabled. Unfortunately, the version on the Obsoletes wasn’t updated when it was disabled for the last time, so I’m not sure this is working as intended.

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/chromium/blob/rawhide/f/chromium.spec#_848

I linked to an explanation for this earlier:

Chrome Remote Desktop recently had to switch to a different signaling service. Unfortunately, the new service doesn’t support third-party API access, so it will only work with official builds, and a third-party build using the Fedora API keys would not be expected to work at this time. I don’t know if we’ll be able to relax this restriction in the future, but for now the only solution would be to use the official host binary.

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So would it be possible to make it work via toolbx/distrobox ?

I’m desperately trying to make it work since but can’t