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 forward_input, issue

make forward_input

On the machine which will receive input, run

sudo remote-inputd

On the client, run

forward_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 inpud /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
forward_input localhost

This is hardly new technology, plenty of more "complete" solutions are available:

• Synergy: Designed to share mouse and keyboard between multiple computers. Requires X.
• x2x: Forward input one X server to another, i.e. no console input.
• SSH + xdotool: Also requires a X server, and isn't really designed for input forwarding..