Saturday, November 8, 2014

How to use KDE Connect in Ubuntu and elementary OS

KDE Connect is tightly designed for KDE Framework. But I'm desperately want it so that i wrote an AppIndicator and a wrapper script which would help me to use KDE Connect in Ubuntu and elementary OS. The result is amazing, you can take take a look at this post.
As its not designed for Ubuntu and elementary OS, I have to overcome some limitation
  1. Notification is Passive

  2. If you send pair request from your phone, a notification will nicely appear in your top right side. But how do you accept it, clicking will make it disappear? (You can't even click on Ubuntu).
    So for now, the only way to pair your device is from desktop and accept it in your phone. In the future elementary's notification will support action button too, so you can accept it from desktop.
  3. Remote Touchpad doesnt work

  4. Ubuntu 14.04 default repository is shipped with KDE Connect 0.5 while for touchpad you will need KDE Connect 0.7.1 which you can get from backport repository or you can download from. Keyboard also not yet working, because you need to have 0.7.3 version of KDE Connect.
    update: I've upload KDE Connect 0.7.3, Ubuntu and elementaryOS user should now have all features
  1. KDE Connect is not Started on Login

    You have to manually add KDE Connect Indicator to you startup application which you can find in your System Setting.
  2. I cannot share file from my file manager

  3. for Pantheon Files, there should be a new menu which offer you to send file via KDE Connect. 
    For Nautilus and Thunar you should  create a Nautilus-actions (install nautilus-actions) or Thunar-actions entry with "kdeconnect-send %f" as command 
Maybe thats all, add comment below if you have some questions
Test it if you brave enough, file bug and take a look at the code here https://github.com/vikoadi/indicator-kdeconnect 

4 comments:

Przemas said...

tried on live us elementary OS and samsung s4 - haven't managed to get it work so far. When I request pairing from my PC nothing happens.
When trying to pair form the phone it works as in the guide - I get the "bubble" in the eOS , but as I can't accept using ubuntu indicators again pairing does not work.

Anonymous said...

I'd rather suggest creating script like that below.

#!/bin/bash

while [ $1 ]; do
kdeconnect-send $1
shift
done

Enjoy!

Unknown said...

Does not work.
Send a request for pairing from the desktop computer. The phone displays a notification "Request for pairing". But, clicking on it has no buttons to Accept or Reject the request. There is only one button "Send pairing request".

Vishal Bhalani said...

I am not able to install indicator-kdeconnect package in debian jessie. whereas kdeconnect package is available in debian repo so i can easily get it by apt-get install kdeconnect. I can see package in ubuntu and how to install that ubuntu indicator-kdeconnect package to my debian? Does it have any compatibility issue ?