Chrome Remote Desktop on Ubuntu

Well, that was an adventure. I just got Chrome Remote Desktop set up on my home server, running Ubuntu, following these instructions.

There were a few wrinkles, mainly caused by my wanting to try out a several different desktops, and then not wiping them out properly. Once I had gotten to the point of being able to connect, I was seeing a wallpaper on a giant desktop that I couldn’t do anything with. It looked like I was seeing the extension of a login screen or something.

My solution was to uninstall all of the desktops, and as many of their dependencies and child packages as possible (without wiping out chrome-remote-desktop or xvfb), and then re-installed xubuntu-desktop. After that, all that was needed was to create a .xsession file:

Then, I killed the process running xvfb and re-connected with CRD, and was off to the races! I still have a gigantic desktop, 3840x1600, so if anyone knows how to configure chrome-remote-desktop to launch a smaller desktop, I’d be glad to hear it.

EDIT: Found the solution, edit this file: /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop and to reflect the following changes:

chrome chrome os linux ubuntu