As mentioned in the previous post, I recently got a Chromebook for Christmas. The plan was to use it for general browsing and writing blog posts, and connecting to my main laptop for more serious development work. I was looking at Chrome Remote Desktop as a way of doing that.

Given that my main laptop runs Ubuntu, I had to jump a few hoops to connect to it. I followed the regular instructions, however, because I was running Unity on my laptop, connecting to it via RDP was a problem. So I decided to install LXDE as a light-weight desktop environment to run when logging in from outside. Here’s how I did it:

First install LXDE on main laptop:

sudo apt-get install lxde

Then, create a session file for telling Chrome Remote Desktop to use LXDE on connection (starts a virtual session):

vi ~/.chrome-remote-desktop-session

Then, type in:

exec /usr/bin/startlxde

Then shutdown and restart the Chromoting service:

sudo service chrome-remote-desktop restart

Then login from the Chrome Remote Desktop app. Things should work. If you want you can also set the screen resolution of the virtual desktop by adding the following line in your .profile:

export CHROME_REMOTE_DESKTOP_DEFAULT_DESKTOP_SIZES=1024x768

Restart the service:

sudo /etc/init.d/chrome-remote-desktop stop
sudo /etc/init.d/chrome-remote-desktop start