Installing Linux Onto Chromebook

 By Morgan Lucas

Also posted here.

Do you remember that second hand Chromebook I bought for a client years ago?

They upgraded and returned it. So, let's put Linux or Ubuntu on it.

I'm going to see if I can put a distro in there and switch between Chrome OS and Linux.

Hunting For The Commands

It took longer to find the correct package to install than anything else. Out of the proverbial Chrome Development Mode box, it doesn't recognize apt, apt-get, yum - Nor does it recognize any attempts to install them.

Actually going through the Chromebook's Linux option puts Penguin on the machine, the default container to run Linux. It struggled to even get started, so I deleted the Linux container and attempted it again, this time successfully.

Into the Container

Where did the container confusion come from?

Most instructions say to enable your Chromebook’s Developer Mode then open a certain terminal, and run some commands. Instead, I’ve found you enable Linux Penguin through Chrome OS (easy, check your settings) and use that containerized version.

When you do this, Crostini is already installed, which is a more secure form of Crouton. Crouton is outdated. Crostini creates a Linux container within Chromebook OS, and they both have neat bread names.


Using Commands


But now it's time to reacquaint myself with actually using Linux. I couldn't get a full Ubuntu setup to replace Chromebook, apparently a security issue, but I can at least use the penguin container, which is Linux running in a little box in Chrome OS.

The edition is 6.6.50, even after updating. No problem, but some commands do no work. I know there are different Linux distros, but I thought most commands were the same.

I wrote my first Bash script thanks to the Learn Linux For Beginners Book on FreeCodeCamp.org that tells me the date and the files and folders in a directory of my choosing;


The container uses a side google account of mine.

I also parsed log information with commands like 'sort', 'awk', 'cut' and 'sed', managed background processes with ['&', 'fg', 'jobs', and 'kill'] commands, and managing cron, a time-based scheduler.

I'm continuing to learn and am posting updates on BlueSky.