Running Linux on a Chromebook

disclaimer: these notes are from 2016.

I got the Acer Chromebook 14 ($300 at the time) because it has an Intel chip, 32GB disk space and 4GB RAM.

install Linux

I used Crouton to instal Linux on it. See this and this. I choose the light Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (also called “precise”) with Xfce4.

Once in Ubuntu, the first issue was the mouse. It was barely working, I had to press really hard. In the terminal I did this to fix the sensitivity of the touchpad: synclient FingerLow=1 FingerHigh=5.

I updated the system just to make sure:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install

Afterwards, it was time to install a bunch of things.

install git

for version control, we’ll use it a lot in the course. very easy: sudo apt-get install git in the terminal.

install gedit

Oh my, there was no text editor. So I got gedit like this: sudo apt-get install gedit.

I used it to add the line synclient FingerLow=1 FingerHigh=5 at the end of my bash profile configuration file: .bashrc.

install qpdfview

to view pdf files, supposed to be light and fast. I did this to install add-apt-repository:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

then this to install qpdfview itself:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:b-eltzner/qpdfview
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qpdfview

install Nautilus

Nautilus is a file browser that makes it really easy to connect to a server (like the stat servers), access remote files and edit these files remotely without having to store them locally.

I installed it with sudo apt-get install nautilus. It can be open by clicking on a folder, or simply typing in the terminal: nautilus .

Go to File then Connect to server and enter the information from one of the statistics servers (using SSH). Clicking on a text file to open with gedit, and you can edit the remote file directly.

install Atom

great text editor. might be too heavy for a chromebook though (?). has a bunch of dependencies.

First I tried the easy way: downloaded Atom v1.8.0 here and ran
```
sudo dpkg --install atom-amd64.deb
```
But it complained about unmet dependencies.
Next I tried building the package from source, using instructions here, which start by getting dependencies (many are essential tools anyway) with this:
```
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot
```
but their own dependencies were not met, like g++, make and dpkg-dev. So I ran this to get them: sudo apt-get -f install and then again
```
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot 
```
I ran another update of the system: sudo apt-get update then got curl like this: sudo apt-get install curl

Another of atom’s dependency is Node.js:
```
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | sudo -E bash -
```

then

  sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Then I followed the build instructions to build atom, in a new directory that I called apps:

  mkdir apps
  cd apps
  git clone https://github.com/atom/atom

etc. But the build failed in the end.

So I retried the installation using the pre-built package downloaded earlier, hoping that the dependencies that were missing earlier would now be taken care of:
```
  sudo dpkg --install ~/Downloads/atom-amd64.deb
```
This time, it worked. I could finally launch my text editor by doing atom.

tips

at boot up: skip the (scary) developer mode message by pressing Ctrl+D.
switching between ChromeOS and Ubuntu (“chroot”) is a struggle. I don’t have a fix for it yet, other than re-boot or do Ctrl-C in the ChromeOS shell.
I disabled the screen saver in Ubuntu (app menu, settings, screen daver, mode) to see if that might help.