I configured a new Ubuntu(20.04) desktop and wanted to be able to log into it remotely. Tried many times with xrdp but kept on getting “authentication is required to create a color profile“, “authentication is required to refresh the system repositories“, or even black screen(not really black screen as I figured out later, it’s acutally a second screen but all Gnome apps don’t show up, Terminal however pops up but not on the local monitor). The authentication issues related to Polkit (/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d) which are too hard to make them right(mine never really worked but I did learn a lot by reading this article ) so I gave up xRDP at the end.
Came to Chrome Remote Desktop, installation quite straightforword however Google’s doc doesn’t mention what to do when it could not detect the completion of installation, run the below command manually.
mkdir ~/.config/chrome-remote-desktop
However it put me in an even worse situiation that Users in setting cannot “unlock”, the button simply greyed out. Of course I didn’t know it was due to Chrome Remote Desktop therefore even re-installed the whole Ubuntu, lessons learnt in the hard way.
Chrome Remote Desktop also brought in the same authentication issues as xRDP, i.e. whenever the first time I logged into the system locally(for xRDP it was when a remote session got initiated). All my Google searches were about xRDP causing the authentication messages but when I didn’t even have xRDP installed and was logging locally, it obviously was due to Chrome Remote Desktop!
Finally landed on this great article where I learned how to solve the annoying authentication messages, as well as always connecting to the same session to remotely manage my Ubuntu, without a monitor attached(a headless HDMI Dummy Plug is needed of course)
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Some additional steps that may be needed:
- go to /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants and rename the newly generated chrome-remote-desktop@xxx.service to something like chrome-remote-desktop@xxx.service_backup, this ensures systemd (systemctl) won’t start up remote desktop automatically(we have put it under the Ubuntu startup menu); otherwise you’ll get the annoying “authentication required” messages such as “Authentication is required to create a color profile“ ,“Authentication is required to create a color managed device“
- the start up script on my system is /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop –child-process –start (note the extra parameter –child-process)