Ubuntu Remote Mouse



  • Remote Touchpad is an open-source utility allows to remote control the mouse and keyboard connected to your computer from the web browser of a smartphone or any other device with a touchscreen. Remote Touchpad supports Flatpak’s RemoteDesktop portal (experimental), Windows and X11. Simply run the utility on your machine.
  • When the KVM controlling the Ubuntu box is switched to a different system, the Remote Desktop session becomes 'frozen'. A TightVNC viewer session will connect, and display the Ubuntu desktop. But any attempt to interact with mouse or keyboard is ignored.

In my search for using the WiiMote as a musical instrument, I found out it’s rather easy to set up your system to use the WiiMote as a mouse. Some of the steps needed to configure your system are actually the same, for being complete I’ll document all steps in this article.

Ubuntu Remote Keyboard And Mouse

Ubuntu Remote Mouse

Prerequisites (what you need to get it working):

Mouse

I believe AndroMouse offers a dead-easy setup and is full of features. You just have to run a java app in your server (your Ubuntu desktop) and the Android app on the client (your phone). Then, you have two options to connect the client to the server: Wi-fi or Bluetooth.

  • Hardware
    • Computer able to run Ubuntu (I prefer Ubuntu Studio).
    • Bluetooth adapter (an adapter for using an open wireless protocol for exchanging data over short distances).
    • Wii Remote (also known as a wiimote, the primary controller for Nintendo’s Wii console)
  • Software
    • Ubuntu Studio (a multimedia editing/creation flavor of Ubuntu. It’s built for the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional)
    • CWiid(a collection of Linux tools written in C for interfacing to the Nintendo Wiimote)

Allright let’s get started :

Where possible I’ll provide the links to the necessary download locations.

You either have a pre-installed Bluetooth adapter on your computer or you can buy one in the shop (make sure it’s Linux compatible).

As we’re using Ubuntu Studio, you can download the DVD Image and burn it to DVD.

You should think over what you going to do with your configuration, repartition your hard disk (or don’t), and install Ubuntu Studio

Make sure you’ve got a Wii Remote with enough power.

Open a terminal session in Ubuntu then copy and paste the following instructions:

Sometimes it comes in handy to know your gear so, at this point, you can turn on the Wii remote to scan by pressing 1 and 2 simultaneously (all the lights will flash) then running:

After you installed the necessary packages, you will be able to give it the first shot by entering wmgui in a terminal window

Select “connect” from the file menu, press 1+2 on the Wiimote when prompted then click OK. Lights and rumble can be turned on and off from the controls menu, and which inputs are displayed from the settings menu. Using this, you can test the IR camera (I didn’t have infrared lights so I used a candle (BE VERY CAREFULL WITH OPEN FIRE IN AND AROUND YOUR LIVING AREA not to set the place on fire)), the accelerometers, and check the inputs from the Nunchuck or Classic Controller.

Now you know the basic set-up is working (your computer running Ubuntu Studio, your Bluetooth adapter, your Wii Remote, and the “connection” between it all).

From here on things are different, from the article about using the WiiMote as a musical instrument (check here).

For using the WiiMote as a mouse we need a mouse emulator (a small program that converts WiiMote output to mouse output) the one we are going to use is called uinput.

Before being able to use uinput we need to load it into the kernel, this can be done in two ways: manually after every reboot or we can load it every time the system starts up.

Manually

Copy and paste the following instructions:

Loading it up every time the system starts up by adding uinput into /etc/modules:

Edit and save /etc/modules (mine looks like this)

Now reboot your system if you choose the latter option (editing /etc/modules).

We need the MAC-address of our WiiMote, there are multiple ways of getting this address:

Now we can start doing our mouse thing by telling wminput to listen to the right WiiMote (telling the WiiMote to listen to which MAC address) (make sure you use your own MAC-address !!!):

(if you get the following error “unable to open uinput” try using the wminput command in SU mode as you didn’t have enough rights to use uinput).

Ubuntu Remote Mouse Download

Now you’re ready to rock and roll!!

Two more things:

  • You can close the terminal window if you want to
  • If you’re ready using your WiiMote press the off button on your Wiimote.

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line!

Needs Expansion
This article is incomplete, and needs to be expanded. More info...

  • Multimedia Keyboard Help - How to get your keyboard's additional multimedia keys working in Ubuntu

  • NumLock - Enabling Num Lock during startup

  • HowToReadline - Add some extra editing keys to the command shell

  • LogitechG15 - Make ubuntu recognize all of the special keys

  • AppleKeyboard - Correct issues with USB Aluminium Apple Keyboard

  • Define a key to enter international characters (a ComposeKey)

  • Multi-buttoned Mouse - Getting the fourth, fifth or other extra buttons on your mouse working

  • Logitech MX610 - Getting the E-Mail and IM LEDs and other buttons to function properly

  • Bluetooth Mouse - Getting your bluetooth mouse to connect and resume automatically, once turned on.

  • Serial Mouse - Getting your serial mouse to function

  • Logitech Marble Mouse USB - Getting the scroll function to work using fdi policy in newest Xorg.

  • Apple Magic Mouse - getting scroll from your bluetooth magic mouse.

  • A4tech X-755K - a special kind of multi-buttoned configurable mouse, which can send both mouse and keyboard key pressed information as configured macros - information about how can we configure these mices on Ubuntu is very needed

  • Synaptics Touchpad - Setting up a Synaptics touchpad.

  • See TabletSetup in order to setup your tablet.

  • See BluetoothDevices to check which devices have been proved to work with Ubuntu Phone

Ubuntu Remote Mouse Software

  • Wii remoteCWiiD - how to set up Ubuntu to use a Wiimote as a mouse, using the CWiiD library

  • Logitech_UltraX_Remote - how to set up your remote

Ubuntu Remote Desktop Xrdp

CategoryHardware





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