Short Version: CTRL+ALT+F1, sudo apt-get autoremove chrome-remote-desktop, reboot.
Full Article:
I know, its a specific article title – but surely some poor soul will wander in here from the depths of Google and quit pulling their hair out.
As you may have already discovered from the title… Google’s Chrome Remote Desktop no-worky on Linux Mint 19 at the time of writing (July 2018). That’s because it takes over a startx session ALL ON ITS OWN as a service when you reboot. Not cool.
So… there are two ways to fix this (both require the removal of Chrome Remote Desktop. I ended up removing Google Chrome completely – but I don’t think that is necessary; Removing Chrome RD should be enough.
Step 1) Don’t hit OK to the “Could not acquire name on session bus” error. Hit “CTRL+ALT+F1”. This will launch a login on terminal. Log in with your username and password.
Step 2) Hit “ls” (that’s a lowercase L; thanks English) to “list” the folders you’re staring at. By default, you should be in the home directory of your user (so, picutres, desktop, etc may show up).
Step 3) type “cd .config”. This is a hidden folder. CD will push our terminal session into that folder. Go ahead and hit “ls” again to list the folders in here. We need to delete the one called “chrome remote desktop”. Simply deleting it isn’t enough. You’ll run the following to fully remove it automatically:
sudo apt-get autoremove chrome-remote-desktop
And… after its done, type the following into terminal:
Reboot
All better! Now you’ll have a login window (or you’ll hit the desktop if you have it set to log in automatically).
Enjoy.
Thank YOU! Saved me alot of debugging on that one.
Thank you so much!
Thank you. Did you find a way to make this work? I can easily use chrome rd once installed, but if logged in on the local device, it only displays a blank background of the desktop. Once I log out, then I can view remotely. I have 1 time been able to log in with it installed without the error. I have no idea why that worked once though.
Have you had any success in getting this working in Linux Mint 19?
Thank you so so much
Laughing my but off right now at your opening….. I still have some hair, so thank you!
I am in a position where I really, really need to be able to use Chrome Remote Desktop on many machines. Most of them are Windows machines and most of them are for users that are not up to doing any configs. I will just leave it at that…. Do you have any answers, close to a year later, where CRD will work with LM 19.1?
TIA
This worked but, after a remote success, I am not able to log in anymore.
LM 19.1
Any suggestions?
Thanx!
“some poor soul will wander in here from the depths of Google”
I was that guy.
Thanks so much.