Introduction

Google has provided a list of devices that before 2019, could still have Crostini installed. After 2019 all devices are expected to offer Crostini support. Crostini isn’t an operating system. Rather, it is a Linux application support to work with Chrome OS. It integrates well and it’s easy to use. We can install an Arch Linux distribution in it for example. This year I bought my first Chromebook. This was model C302C. It is pretty affordable. Unfortunately for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to provide any support for Crostini anyway! This is the reason why I wrote this article and also why I think it’s still very relevant. We are going to see how to install another alternative environment with Linux in it. My Google Chrome OS is version 83.04091.0.Going through the intricacies of the Google Chrome OS operating system I realized that this is an operating system brilliantly made for an average user. We can download and use our favorite google store apps, play our music on Spotify, watch videos on YouTube, make our TikTok videos, with the extra advantage of being able to work with it as if it was a common computer. With this system, we can still make our PowerPoints, send our emails, use Microsoft Office, make Word documents, Excels, use Note, and browse endlessly through the Web. Further we can also watch our favorite series and videos using NetFlix. A system like this can be a blessing if we have to commute a lot to and back from work and of course for any long trip. However, when I dove into this system I immediately had this dilemma:Everything is so great and yet so different! How does this work for a Software Engineer?Let’s turn our Chrome OS machine into a powerful DevOps machine without changing its operating system!

Notes

With this article I’m providing a quick guide on how to turn our Chrome OS machine into a powerful DevOps machine. The goal is to provide a guide instead of a rule. These are the steps that have worked in my case and I’m sharing them with you in order to help you. More details can be found on the source references I placed on the last card. Let’s begin!

Preparation

Before we start, there are a few things to be aware:

System Setup

Download Software

In order to be able to work with our Chrome OS machine as a DevOps engineer, we need to have some sort of Linux shell, and we need to be able to run executable files and install software. For chrome we have crouton which is the Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment.To best follow further instructions, let’s take note that we will download everything into the default ~/Downloads folder. Also, important to notice, is that at the end of this section we will have a Chrome OS environment and an Xfce Desktop Environment distributed by Xubuntu.Before we continue let’s make sure we download the software we are going to need for Xfce.

Extending our OS

Let’s begin:

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Xfce Visual Setup

Xfce Utilities Setup

As of this moment, your Linux “Machine” is ready for all our DevOps activities. In this chapter, however we are going to have a look at the command recipe, I used to set up the main Linux utilities that I love and I think are very much needed in a developers' environment. Let’s open the terminal at Applications -> Terminal Emulator. Here is this recipe:

cd ~/Downloads
tar -xvzf jetbrains-toolbox-1.16.6319.tar.gz
cd jetbrains-toolbox-1.16.6319
./jetbrains-toolbox

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Conclusion

We have seen pointers on how to turn our Chrome OS machine into a powerful and handy DevOps engineering machine. It is also a description of my own personal experience with a Google Chrome book. In the end a Chrome book is also a great computer, it has different look and feel, different commands, but we can still run our favorite Linux commands and make the most of it. Essentially in this guide, we started out with this:

and we have added this:

I hope you have enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing them and I hope to have helped anyone with blocking issues. I found lots of guides on the internet but eventually some things I had to find on my own. This is why I decided to share my experience with you.I have run these steps in a ASUS C302C google notebook with a pre-installed Chrome OS version 63.0.3239.116 (Official build) (64-bits). Then I changed this version to 83.04091.0.I hope that you have enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, so please leave your comments below.Thanks in advance for your help, and thank you for reading!

References