TeamViewer is a popular application for remote control, desktop sharing, file transfer, online meetings and more, that's available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android and iPhone. The application is free (freeware) for personal use only!
The Linux version uses Wine which comes bundled with it (it doesn't require the user to install Wine, like the old Picasa for Linux package), so it's not a native Linux application.
The latest TeamViewer 8 (stable) for Windows was released back in December and today, the stable version is also available for Linux. While in beta, there were two bugs that affected for many users (myself included) until recently, which resulted either an "TeamViewer Daemon is not running. Please start teamviewerd and then restart TeamViewer" error message or a ghost window showing up.
But these issues seem fixed and TeamViewer 8 for Linux has worked properly in my tests under Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04. I'm not sure if these issues were present in other Linux distributions and if they were fixed or not.
Upgrading to the latest TeamViewer 8 is required if you want to establish a remote connection to a computer running TeamViewer 8, however, this is not neccesary if you want to connect to a computer running TeamViewer 4, 5, 6 or 7 if you're using TeamViewer 7.
What's new in TeamViewer 8 for Linux
The most important change in the latest TeamViewer 8 for Linux is probably the addition of a daemon, which makes it possible to connect to a Linux computer on the login screen (so no user has to be logged in to be able to share that computer's desktop with TeamViewer). However, this feature didn't work most of the time in my tests running TeamViewer 8 in Ubuntu and trying to connect to other Ubuntu systems using TeamViewer 8 but it might have something to do with VirtualBox because connecting from my Android device to my Ubuntu 13.04 computer has worked pretty well.
Other new features available in remote desktop application Teamviewer 8 for Linux:
- Session recording (both video and sound, however, only the sound from Windows computers is recorded) and playback now works under Linux. This works with both online meetings and remote control sessions. However, converting the TeamViewer video files to other formats like avi, etc., is not available on Linux for now;
- Session handover from one expert to another;
- Share selected groups with other TeamViewer accounts;
- Remote account logout (from the TeamViewer Management Console);
- A new TeamViewer Management Console (login here) which includes web-based administration of your entire support team, integrated TeamViewer Web Connector and expanded TeamViewer Manager features. The user management feature is not free, but you can try it without buying a TeamViewer license for a limited period of time;
- Enabled Basic Authentication for proxies;
- Webcams are now supported for video-streaming during meetings;
- Instead of four different RPM-packages, there's now one single package for all RPM-based distributions (RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE);
- TeamViewer can now be installed on Multiarch systems (Debian 7, 64-bit)
Many bug fixes and improvements
To use the new feature that allows you to connect to a Linux computer on the login screen (meaning there are no logged in users on the remote computer and only the login screen has loaded), you'll need to set up a password for unattended access.
To do this, open TeamViewer 8 on the remote computer, and click the "Personal Password" field on the main interface, then follow the instructions. Then copy the computer ID and you can log out the remote computer. Now, to connect to the remote computer in which no user is currently logged it, you can launch TeamViewer 8 for Linux on your system, enter the remote (Partner) ID - you'll then be prompted to enter the password you've set up above and you're ready to go.
Download TeamViewer 8 for Linux
Download TeamViewer8 for Linux (also available for Windows, Mac and mobile)
Arch Linux users can install it via AUR.
Note: if you've previously installed TeamViewer 8 for Linux and it doesn't start, purge it ("sudo apt-get purge teamviewer"), then download and install the latest version.
