KDEConnect

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Revision as of 00:35, 21 July 2017 by Rodsevich (talk | contribs) (→‎firewalld: in bold)

This is the comunity page for KDE Connect. Feel free to edit it! It should contain useful and up to date resources for both users and developers.

What is KDE Connect?

KDE Connect is a project to communicate across all your devices. For example, with KDE Connect you can receive your phone notifications on your desktop computer, control music playing on your phone from your desktop, or use your phone as a remote control for your desktop. To achieve this, KDE Connect:

  • implements a secure communication protocol over the network, and allows any developer to create plugins on top of it.
  • Has a component that you install on your desktop
  • Has a KDE Connect client app you run on your phone.

This video from 2013 demonstrates some other cool features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkCFngNmsh0

More info at Albert Vaka's blog

Installation

You will most likely find the KDE Connect desktop component as a package in your distribution's repos. If you use a desktop environment other than KDE's Plasma, you might also want to install indicator-kdeconnect, that provides a system tray as a GUI for other desktops.

The app for Android can be found in both the Google Play Store and the free and open store F-Droid. There was some development of an KDE Connect client app for iOS in 2014 (see source code) and supposedly a client app for Blackberry (where?).

If you use the Firefox browser, this cool extension lets you send links in the browser to the phone app.

If you are a Chrome/Chromium (or compatible) user, this extension lets you "send pages and content from your browser to connected KDE Connect devices, via browser action or context menu." See its Github page for installation instructions.

Troubleshooting

I have two devices running KDE Connnect on the same network, but they can't see each other

KDE Connect uses dynamic ports in the range 1714-1764 for UDP and TCP. So if you are behind a firewall, make sure to open this port range for both TCP and UDP. Otherwise, make sure your network is not blocking UDP broadcast packets.

ufw

If your firewall is ufw, you can open the necessary ports with:

sudo ufw allow 1714:1764/udp
sudo ufw allow 1714:1764/tcp
sudo ufw reload

firewalld

If your firewall is firewalld, you can open the necessary ports with:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=1714-1764/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=1714-1764/udp
sudo systemctl restart firewalld.service

Fedora firewall

In Fedora there is a program to configure the firewall. Open Firewall Configuration (the program's filename is firewall-config), and in Zones > Services check the kde-connect service.

My KDE Connect crashes or restarts when trying to pair with another device

Some times, a corrupt config file may cause KDE Connect to crash when trying to pair with a device. In that case, deleting the config ~/.config/kdeconnect might help.

Can I run KDE Connect without a display server?

Yes, you can pass the command line argument `-platform offscreen` to the daemon (eg: `killall -9 kdeconnectd; /usr/lib/libexec/kdeconnectd -platform offscreen`)

My problem is not in this list :(

In case you find a bug and want to report it, you can do so in the KDE bugtracker: http://bugs.kde.org

Development

If you are interested in contributing to KDE Connect, please join the mailing list of the project. You might also want to read Albert Vaca's development blog.

You can find the sources in the following repositories: