Chrome OS support

[Jerry00]

I think there have been others that have wished for this, but I'd love to see Chrome OS support. With Chromebooks being more popular in various situations, being able to share the Chromebook screen would be great.

[Kelvin Tran]

I'm going to create an unofficial response for this, just to satisfy you for the time being until actual Symless staff come.

Unless there can be a universal Linux binary that is created that will work for Chrome OS as well, creating a specialized Chrome OS version of this software might take too much up in resources when considering the relatively minute return on their investment that they will get for including Chrome OS support. Additionally, with the sandbox that Chrome OS runs in (among other concerns), there might be a lot of technical implications in giving Synergy direct access to operating system-level elements (e.g. the mouse).

This is not a definitive no, but I'm going to predict that they will say no.

[Jerry00]

Thanks for the quick response. I seem to remember a beta a while back for Android. I think Chrome OS now supports (and encourages) Android apps for Chrome OS. I think the Android tablet market and Chorme OS market could be covered with one version. That would be awesome.

[Kelvin Tran]

The problem is, with the type of application Synergy is, it'd be VERY difficult to code a one-version-fits-all application due to the fact that Chrome OS uses much different services than Android. Normal apps like games will work fine, but once you step into the territory of applications that take control of operating system-specific elements, you'll find that the way the mouse and keyboard inputs are handled on Chrome OS works very differently than how it works on Android.

[jaap aarts]

I don't think Google would allow users to install this kind of application.

in order to do this Symless would probably have to work together with Google to make this happen.

I don't think many people in the Linux community would like to install something close source that Google worked on, so it would have to be a separate binary.

I have not used a Chromebook before, but I thought that you could only install web apps(and now Android apps).

right now I suspect that the Android apps run on a virtual machine and thus have no control over the cursor of the actual Chromebook.

this would either have to be an option in the installer (since this runs with root privileges, on most Linux distro's), or Google has to make an exception for this application to be installed; but this would be a serious security flaw. a hardware mouse/keyboard simulator that could also track keyboard and mouse would be the only option.

[jaap aarts]

7 hours ago, Kelvin Tran said:

The problem is, with the type of application Synergy is, it'd be VERY difficult to code a one-version-fits-all application due to the fact that Chrome OS uses much different services than Android. Normal apps like games will work fine, but once you step into the territory of applications that take control of operating system-specific elements, you'll find that the way the mouse and keyboard inputs are handled on Chrome OS works very differently than how it works on Android.

if you have a Linux executable it would work on most linux distro's, the problem is mostly that all the packages have different names and that all the distributions have different install packages.