Weylus, turn your phone into a touch screen for your desktop

about weylus

In the next article we are going to take a look at Weylus. This is a tool that will help us turn our tablet or mobile phone into a touch screen, allowing us to duplicate or extend the desktop screen to one of these devices. It is an application that we can find available for Gnu / Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS.

Weylus will allow us to control the mouse with a tablet or phone, mirror the desktop screen to a tablet, and send keyboard input, all with hardware-accelerated video encoding. To use a phone or tablet as a touch screen, all we will need is to install Weylus on our Ubuntu system, have a modern web browser running on it. phone, and have both the desktop and the phone on the same network.

It is worth noting that Weylus works better with X11, even though it has experimental support from Wayland. Things that don't work in Wayland include input mapping for windows, displaying proper window names, and catching the cursor.

General characteristics of Weylus

desktop seen from weylus

  • Will allow us control the mouse with our tablet or phone.
  • We can view desktop screen on phone.
  • The program it will allow us to send the keyboard input using physical keyboards.
  • It has hardware accelerated video encoding.

weylus running with gimp

  • Available holder for a stylus.
  • Multi touch. We can test it with software that supports multi-touch, such as Chalk.
  • We will be able capture specific windows and draw on them.
  • Screen mirroring faster.
  • Will allow us use a tablet or phone as a second screen.

These are some of the features that this program offers. They can consult all in detail from the project's GitHub repository.

Weylus installation on Ubuntu

Weylus is available for Gnu / Linux, macOS and Windows, and binaries for all 3 can be found on their releases page. For Gnu / Linux, we will find a DEB package (for Debian / Ubuntu distributions and distributions based on these) and a generic file that should work on any Gnu / Linux distribution.

To install this program in Ubuntu, we can use the web browser and download the .deb package from the project releases page. In addition we will also have the possibility of using wget in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) to download the latest version of the program published today:

download the .deb package

wget https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus/releases/download/v0.11.2/Weylus_0.11.2_amd64.deb

Once the download is finished, we can proceed to installation with this other command:

install weylus

sudo apt install ./Weylus_0.11.2_amd64.deb

When the installation is complete, there is only launch the application by searching for the launcher in our team:

app launcher

If you use a firewall, make sure ports 1701 and 9001 are open. It is also very important to note that To enable touch and multi-touch support, Weylus must be able to write to / dev / uinput. To achieve this, you just have to follow the steps that indicate in your GitHub repository.

weylus directory configuration

A quick look at the program

Weylus desktop user interface is basic. It will only show us a few options, with which we can configure the link address, port and access code used to connect to Weylus. In addition, we will also find options to automatically start Weylus, enable Wayland support, as well as hardware acceleration options.

weylus interface

To connect to Weylus using our smartphone or tablet, the application shows some URLs that we can access using a web browser from these devices. Also It will show us a QR code that can be scanned to connect more easily.

options in android

When you visit this URL from your phone or tablet, you can modify some more options. In Gnu / Linux, we can choose if we want to capture the entire desktop, a particular monitor or a window, enable / disable video, capture cursor, mouse, set the minimum pressure and configure the maximum video resolution and the frame rate interval minimum

Uninstall

For remove this program from our system, we will only need to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the command in it:

uninstall Weylus

sudo apt remove weylus

It can get more information about this program from project's GitHub repository.


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