Forward input from your desktop to another Linux device over a TCP connection!
remote-input is split in two parts:
remote-inputd: a daemon which listens for incoming connections and propagates client events to the Linux input subsystem.- a forwarding client. Currently, there is only an implementation for X11:
xforward-input.
remote-inputd uses the Linux uinput module to create a virtual device. There
are no other dependencies, which makes remote-input suitable for use in
embedded/Android devices, but as there is no protection whatsoever it shouldn't
be used outside of private/trusted networks.
To build the remote-inputd daemon, issue
make
To build xforward-input, issue
make xforward-input
On the machine which will receive input, run
sudo remote-inputd
On the client, run
xforward-input <hostname>
to grab the mouse and keyboard and forward input to <hostname>.
A rooted device is required!
Assuming ANDROID_NDK variable is set in your environment (it should be set
if you installed the Android NDK) run:
make TARGET=ANDROID
Remount the system filesystem read-writeable, and install push remote-inputd:
adb root
adb remount
adb push remote-inputd /system/bin
If that doesn't work, but you have managed to get su installed, you can
try to manually remount the /system partition and install without using cp:
adb push remote-inputd /data/local/tmp
adb shell
$ su
# mount -o remount,rw /system
# cat /data/local/tmp > /system/bin/remote-inputd
# chmod 755 /system/bin/remote-inputd
Only API level 21 and up are inherently supported, as the linux/uinput.h
header file is missing from the lower API level platform images. However, I've
found that most Android versions do in fact load the uinput module.
Even though it's possible to connect wirelessly, using adb forward results in
lower latency:
adb forward tcp:4004 tcp:4004
adb shell remote-inputd
xforward-input localhost
This is hardly new technology, plenty of more "complete" solutions are available: