Installing Google Chrome Remote Desktop messed up my box
I was playing around with Chrome Remote Desktop and after a restart of my Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 box, things got really weird. First, I was prompted for a second entry of my password. Then, all my Google Chrome extensions were reset. And, finally, I noticed that I had no sound whatsoever.
After digging around in the audio settings, I discovered the following:
It looks like the original sound output was switched over to Chrome Remote Desktop with no option to reset it. Overall my computer felt like I was logged into a guest setting.
How the heck do I fix this?
Solution 1:
This is what I did to fix the same issue. This way you don't have to restart your machine:
sudo rm -rf ~/.config/chrome-remote-desktop
killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio --start
gnome-shell --replace
It was also affecting my Gnome Apps. I was mad because I spent hours thinking it was because of my Yubikey since it's a U2F/FIDO2 Security Key. So I made sure to be forceful. I hope this is a cure-all for some folks until Google can make some fixes, I sent a feedback report to them about this.
Solution 2:
There is some problem with Chrome Remote Desktop with Ubuntu. To get your system sound back for all applications you should remove the extension from both Chrome and Ubuntu.
Run the following command:
sudo apt-get remove chrome-remote-desktop
and restart Ubuntu.
Solution 3:
Somehow I manage to make the audio work in Ubuntu 18.04 with Chrome Remote Desktop still installed, by creating file .chrome-remote-desktop-session in user folder
cd ~
touch .chrome-remote-desktop-session
and put this lines to the file
unset PULSE_CONFIG_PATH
unset PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH
unset PULSE_SINK
unset PULSE_STATE_PATH
DESKTOP_SESSION=ubuntu XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity /usr/sbin/lightdm-session 'gnome-session --session=ubuntu'
I don't know if restarting ubuntu is required or not, but I realize this works after reboot
Ref: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=496885
Solution 4:
I found that by removing (rather, renaming) the ~/.config/chrome-remote-desktop directory and restarting, my sound defaulted to the standard line out.