How to install Anydesk in Manjaro Linux

Among the various applications I’ve used lately for remote desktop (i.e. TeamViewer, VNCViewer, Remote Desktop etc.), Anydesk is certainly the most interesting one.

I found it in its free version that is better than TeamViewer for everyday (basic) use. Meaning manage some of my PCs on the fly or help friends and relatives solve some problems remotely.

It is very fast, stable and available on various operating systems with remote control that appears very “responsive” even on networks that certainly do not shine for speed.

Today we will see how it is possible to install AnyDesk on a version of Manjaro Linux, in particular a 20.2. I recently installed it on an old Asus N56VZ laptop in dual boot with Windows 10.

On the download page dedicated to Anydesk Linux, there are different packages for Ubuntu / Debian based or Redhat / CentOS / Fedora distros. In addition to these, also the generic tar.gz package for all other 32 or 64 bit Linux distributions.

The tar.gz package obviously in the README reports the list of all the libraries on which AnyDesk depends, both the minimum required and the optional ones. So the solution is to check that they are all present, perhaps by running the executable command anydesk itself in order to see any error messages and evaluate which ones are not present and installed. After a couple of attempts I preferred to look for an alternative solution, particularly after I managed to find the “anydesk-bin” package within the ArchLinux User Repository.

In fact, through the description file PKGBUILD and the relative command makepkg it was pretty easy to build the package to feed to pacman.

But let’s see below in detail the steps with their description.

# Optional - if you don´t have GIT already installed
sudo pacman -S git

# Let's clone the GIT repository for anydesk-bin to a target directory
cd ~/tools
git clone http://aur.archlinux.org/anydesk-bin.git

# Let's try to generate the package using makepkg
cd anydesk-bin
makepkg -s

It is possible that, at this point, an error message similar to this is displayed:==> ERROR: Cannot find the fakeroot binary.

# In order to solve the problem caused by the missing base tools for compilation
sudo pacman -S base-devel

# Let's re-trigger the command for package creation and later proceed to its installation via pacman
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U anydesk-bin-6.0.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

To start using the program, you can simply enter “anydesk” in the open terminal window.

It is also possible to configure the systemd service so that AnyDesk is available from the login screen at each restart.

sudo systemctl enable --now anydesk

Now you just have to configure some additional AnyDesk information if you wish, such as the possibility of automatic access ("unattended access") using a password.