

Run Crouton in a Chrome OS Window - T-A
https://plus.google.com/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/JDVkXALPcNq

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mikeflynn
For those of you looking to get this going here's a tip: At the moment there
is a bug in Crouton where you need to put "wixi" first in the list of targets
when building a new chroot to get the extension to bind correctly.

~~~
mikeflynn
Typo: I meant "xiwi".

    
    
      sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t xiwi,extension,core -r trusty

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timothylaurent
My experience getting this to actually work on my Chomebooks (didn't work at
first), and then turning it off. I turned it off because at this point 3d
acceleration isn't enabled in the Chrome window, so games like Minecraft are
not performant enough. A dev environment should work great though.

This is copied from the g + thread.

I have tried this and initially had some issues getting it to work, maybe my
experience can help others to get this working:

For me I already had a crouton chroot running Ubuntu Trusty on 2 different
Chromebook so I did not want to wipe and start over (after all in unix
everything is a file).

so to update my chroots I did this after installing the chrome browser
extension:

$ sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -u -e -t xiwi,extension -n trusty

this loads the new targets and the '-e' encrypts the chroot and forces me to
make a root password for the Chromebook which seems like a good idea.

So on one machine this is all I had to do ... .If I run $ sudo startxfce4 it
pops up a window, however for the other machine it would continue to open full
screen.

the reason for this is wrong symbolic link at /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

basically if it is linked to /etc/crouton/xserverrc-x11 you get the full
screen version, if it is linked to /etc/crouton/xserverrc-xiwi you get the
windowed linux.

to change this simply:

$ ln -s /etc/crouton/xserverrc-[xiwi|x11] /etc/x11/xinit/xserverrc

edit: Google plus's markup syntax is jacked with no apparent way to escape a
"-"; so the strikethrough is artifactual.

broken up: $ ln -s /etc/crouton/xserverrc-[xiwi|x11] /etc/x11/xinit/xserverrc

(the brackets [] with the | indicate choose one)

These computers are used by my kids and the linux partition is primarily used
to play Minecraft. As there is not currently hardware graphics acceleration in
the xiwi linux chrome window the performance is quite poor with Minecraft so I
switched back to the xserverrc-x11 config. This will be much better once GPU
acceleration is supported in window (whispers of which can be seen on the
github PR), until then I guess we will have to <Ctl>+<alt>+<shift> \+ forward
and back to use linux on our Chromebooks.

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frik
Sounds great.

I would like to read about your experience using ChromeOS/ChromiumOS on a dev
PC. What's your workflow (text editor, dev-IDE, web stack)?

~~~
jallmann
My ChromeOS machine is a thin client that's used for SSH, connecting to either
a server somewhere, or a beefier computer at home, so I can work from the
couch.

Originally had crouton set up for some local dev (CLI tools only to save RAM;
vim and a compiler are all I need), but it kept trashing SD cards. Everything
was run off SD cards, because my particular chromebook (Acer C720) doesn't
have that much onboard storage, only 16GB or so. But SSH is really all that I
need.

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josteink
If you dont want ChromeOS but a real laptop, why not just get a proper laptop
instead?

~~~
bachmeier
The Chromebook is a good piece of hardware for the price. And it's not a
_laptop_ but a _Linux laptop_ which you don't just pick up at the local Best
Buy. It's a mess putting Linux on a Windows 8 laptop.

~~~
josteink
> It's a mess putting Linux on a Windows 8 laptop.

I can see how it affects the price and things gets a bit more expensive due to
the Windows-license, but how on earth is it "a mess" installing Linux on a
laptop which previously had Windows on it?

Especially given all the loopholes and workarounds people have to resort to to
actually get Linux running on these locked down so-called "Linux" laptops?

I mean... This article itself is proof that Chromebooks are worse than
Windows-laptops, right?

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denniskane
Speaking of things running in places where they were not necessarily meant to
run, I have pretty much ported all of Unix to run as an HTML5 app in a browser
tab. The whole thing is just a steaming pile of javascripty goodness.

It currently just copies OSX for the GUI, but I just wanted to do that to get
people interested in helping me develop it, rather than trying to confuse end
users. I've been hacking on it pretty constantly, all alone, for the past ~2.5
years, so if anyone wants to start working with me, let's talk! You can find
my email on the site by clicking on the Pac Man icon and then "About".

First mission: work on a new GUI look and feel so big bad Apple doesn't come
with their lawyer armies...

Try it at [http://urdesk.net](http://urdesk.net)

~~~
jarvuschris
care to share the unminified source? From what I can see in my inspector it
looks like you've just made some HTML UIs that look like a couple specific Mac
apps, which alone would be a far cry from "porting Unix" and not that original
of an endeavor

~~~
striking
You probably don't want to see the unminified source. He has reimplemented CSS
as well as ASCII conversion in JavaScript. Oh, and he's mutilating prototypes
left and right with extremely necessary functions like

    
    
      HTMLElement.prototype.add = function (a) {
        this.appendChild(a)
      };
    

There's code for asymmetric encryption and some sort of mail client buried in
there... As well as a very faithful almost-Bash parser... and I can't for the
life of me find where `ls`, `ln`, and `pwd` are executing from. Because this
terminal has them apparently.

A lot of work was put into this, a lot of very interesting work. But I feel
like a lot of this could be done a little more easily now with the invention
of Emscripten... and even then, why would we have native apps ported to JS
when we could just have JS apps?

If you have some free time, pop open the Chrome Devtools and click the Sources
tab, paste that JS right into
[http://jsbeautifier.org/](http://jsbeautifier.org/). It is truly interesting.
Just don't know if I'd have written it myself.

I feel like UNIX works well enough right where it is. And if you really need a
true UNIX in-browser,
[http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/) can help you out.

