

Crouton: Chromium OS Ubuntu Chroot Environment - JanLaussmann
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

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talleyrand
Crouton is brilliant. It makes Chrome OS a truly viable proposition for
developers.

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samspenc
You mean it makes _ChromeBooks_ a truly viable proposition for developers. :)

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jessaustin
It appears that crouton doesn't actually replace the OS, so you're both right.

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georgemcbay
It doesn't replace the OS, but all of the "viable for developer" parts of it
come from running inside the Ubuntu chroot, so the fact that ChromeOS still
exists is mostly academic in this context.

FWIW, I've owned one of the Samsung ARM Chromebooks since the week it was
released and I've been running crouton for a couple of months now and it works
really, really, well. I still use the ChromeOS side for very simple browsing
(the Aura window manager is nice if all you need is the web) but switch over
to the ubuntu/X11 interface often to do development work.

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habosa
I have a few questions about running Crouton on my Samsung Chromebook:

1) Have you noticed any effect on battery life or boot time with the chroot
environment in place? 2) Can I access Ubuntu CLI programs from the shell
within ChromeOS or do I need to switch to the full Ubuntu window manager
environment? 3) Any other disadvantages you can think of?

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talleyrand
I'm not an expert on Crouton, but: 1) I haven't noticed any problems with
battery or boot. 2) I use the cli-extra chroot, so no window manager. I have a
tab open in ChromeOS with the crosh shell and switch back and forth to that.
3) None, so far. Before Crouton, I used the Secure Shell extension to ssh into
a remote Ubuntu box, which was fine. Crouton makes it possible to have an
offline development box.

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johnmw
If you are using the Chrome dev tools, is it still possible to locally edit
and save files? Can you view local files with the ChromeOS browser and switch
to the crosh shell, edit and reload?

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talleyrand
I don't know about saving with Dev Tools, but yes you can run an Apache stack
on the chroot and see the files in the Chrome browser

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habosa
Thanks for posting this, it's great to see the source alongside the
instructions. Makes me feel a lot better about running random commands that
install a whole new OS on my Choromebook, and I've been looking to chroot for
a while.

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jordonwii
This is an incredibly useful tool. Allows me to take all my dev work with me
when all I have is my portable Samsung Chromebook.

It's also encouraged me to finally learn how to use Emacs...

