Turn your Chrome OS machine into a powerful DevOps machine with this guide

introduction

Google has provided a list of devices that were still possible to own before 2019 Crostini Installed. All devices are expected to be introduced after 2019 Crostini supports. Crostini Not an operating system. It is a Linux-enabled application to work with Chrome OS. It integrates well and is easy to use. We can install the Arch Linux distribution in it for example. I bought this first year Chromebook. This model was C302C. It is very affordable. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he doesn’t seem to offer any support for Crostini anyway! This is why I wrote this article and also why I think it is still relevant. We will see how to install another alternative environment containing Linux. My Google Chrome OS is version 83.04091.0. Through the intricacies of Google Chrome OS, I realized that this was an operating system brilliantly designed for the average user. We can download and use our favorite Google Store apps, play our music on Spotify, watch videos on YouTube, and make TikTok videos, with the added bonus of being able to work with it as if it were a shared computer. With this system, we can still create our PowerPoint, send our emails, use Microsoft Office, create Word and Excel documents, use Note, and browse endlessly across the web. Moreover, 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 from work and of course for any long trip. However, when I immersed myself in this system, I immediately faced this dilemma: Everything is so great but 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

In this article I provide a quick guide on how to turn our Chrome OS machine into a powerful DevOps machine. The goal is to provide a guide rather than a rule. These are the steps that worked in my case and I will share them with you in order to help you. More details can be found in the source references I placed on the last card. Let’s get started!

to prepare

Before we get started, there are a few things you should be aware of:

• All of our local data will be removed. I couldn’t find a way around it at this point.
• We need to make sure everything we need is backed up in your device.
• The first step may take up to 15 minutes so we also need to make sure that the battery is fully charged or that your device is connected to the power source.

System setup

• Let’s turn off your device.
• We press the key combination ESC + REFRESH and press the ON button in this order. (It is important to note that the refresh button icon may take different forms in our keyboard.)
• We leave the power button on while keeping the other keys on.
• We left the other keys behind.
• Let’s wait until the screen appears. It should say something like: > Please insert a USB stick or SD card
• We press CTRL-D.
• We should now get a screen that says something like:
• To turn off operating system verification, press ENTER. > Your system will reboot and local data will be erased. > To return, press ESC (Escape).
• We press ENTER.
• This process will take between 5 to 15 minutes and the following message will appear: > Preparing the system for developer mode. >This may take some time. > Do not turn off the computer until it restarts.
• After rebooting, we should get this message: > OS verification has been stopped. Press SPACE to re-enable.
• We’ll press CTRL-D instead.
• Our computer should now start normally, and although it looks like a normal machine, it gives us more underwater system rights.

Download software

In order to be able to work with our Chrome OS machine as a DevOps engineer, we need some sort of Linux shell, and we need to be able to run executable files and install software. to chrome Our croton is Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment. To better follow further instructions, let’s note that we will download everything in the default ~/Downloads folder. It is also important to note that at the end of this section we will have Chrome OS environment and Xfce Desktop environment distributed by XubuntuBefore we continue, let’s make sure we’ve downloaded the software we’ll need for Xfce.

• Chrome – We will download the Debian version.
• Intellij Toolbox – We will install the basic JetBrains development environment. We are completely free to choose other tools like Eclipse.
• Croton – At the bottom of the Git page we find its link in the Usage chapter: This will download the bash script that will download and install Xfce on your machine.

Expand our operating system

Let’s get started:

• With the Chrome browser open, we press ALT + CTRL + T. This will open the crosh prompt.

• Let’s open the shell by typing shell and pressing ENTER.

• We can now install the toast. Let’s keep in mind that xfce is one of many comma-separated parameters we can add. If we have a touch machine, we can add touch. If we want to use the integration extension we can use it xiwi (any xfce, touch, xiwi):

  sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce

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• We fill in all the details he asks of us, and we should end up with this result:

  Please specify a username for the root user: jesperancinha Enter the new UNIX password: Retype the new UNIX password: passwd: The password has been updated successfully Here are some tips: The audio from chroot will now be redirected to CRAS (Chromium OS Audio Server), through ALSA plugin. Future Chromium OS upgrades may break compatibility with the installed version of CRAS. If this happens, just update your chroot. You can switch between chroot and Chromium OS desktops by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Back and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Forward. You can start Xfce via the startxfce4 host command: sudo startxfce4 Unmounting /mnt/stateful_partition/crouton/chroots/xenial… Done! You can enter chroot using enter-chroot. chronos@localhost ~ $

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Visual Xfce setup

• Once we get to Xfce, we should see the following screen:

• Depending on the system, we may find that our devices have a character issue. To fix this we have to go to Apps -> Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts. We should see something like this:

• Let’s just choose a font we like that contains all the letters.
• Finally, we may find it important to take screenshots for documentation. To do this, we just need to configure a shortcut to print screen. Let’s go to App -> Settings -> Keyboard -> App Shortcuts. We should look at this:

• All we have to do is click “Add”. A pop-up window like this will appear:

• Let’s fill xfce4-screenshooter -w. This switch will allow us to take a screenshot of the current pop-up window. We can also use -r to take a screenshot of just the selection.
• The next pop-up window will ask you to press your key combination. In the setup example, we see that for this command line there are two shortcuts configured SHIFT + CTRL + F4 and SHIFT + CTRL + F5. This is not a standard and it is up to the user to choose the matching preferred combination. As a fair warning, be careful with this next pop-up as it is very sensitive. It will also recognize the F key when the composition is finished.

Setting up Xfce utilities

As of this moment, your Linux “machine” is ready for all our DevOps activities. In this chapter, we’ll look at the command recipe, which I used to set up basic Linux tools that I love and believe are greatly needed in the developer environment. Let’s open the terminal in Applications -> Terminal Emulator. Here is the recipe:

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

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• Now, we should see JetBrains’ User Agreement notice:

• All we have to do is go ahead with this installation and install only according to the instructions provided

• As standard, I recommend installing IntelliJ. I will mention that as well.

• To install the rest of the utilities and Chrome, I ran into some issues and here are the next steps for this recipe:

  sudo su apt-get install Fonts-liberation apt-get -y -f install apt -y install git apt -y install maven apt -y install npm apt -y install libappindicator1 apt-get -y -f install apt -y install curl apt-get -y install gitk

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• One of the greatest utilities available to Java developers is SDKMAN which acts as a package manager for compilers. As explained on their page, here are the steps needed to make this successful

  sudo cur -s ” | bash sudo source “$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh”

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• Since we need SDK man for our regular user, let’s also run the last command as a non-root user.

  Exit source “$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh”

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• Please see the SDKMAN website for more details on how to install various SDKs
• If everything was successful, we can now run Maven, Git, Curl, npm, Chrome and Intellij. We can also compile the code in Java.
• Finally, just a final note about installing the SDK using SDKMAN. All the environments we choose and install are saved in ~/.sdkman/candidates. This is important if we want to configure our environment in Intellij using specific distributions and versions of Java, Gradle or other compilers. After we’re done with all this, we need to know how to switch from Xfce to Chrome OS and vice versa. This can be easily done using the following key combination: SHITF+CTRL+ALT+BACK and SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+FORWARD. It is important to note that the BACK and FORWARD navigation keys are the ones located on the upper left side of the keyboard. They are also defined as the F1 and F2 keys.

conclusion

We’ve seen signs of how to turn our Chrome OS machine into a powerful, easy-to-use DevOps engineering machine. It is also a description of my personal experience with Google Chrome book. In the end, Chrome Book is also a great computer, it has a different look and feel, different commands, but we can still run our favorite Linux commands and get the most out of them. In this guide, we start with this:

And we added this:

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing it and I hope I helped anyone with blocking issues. I found a lot of guides online but in the end I had to find some things myself. That’s why I decided to share my experience with you. I have implemented these steps in ASUS C302C Google Notebook with Chrome OS version pre-installed 63.0.3239.116 (Official build) (64-bit). Then I changed this version to 83.04091.0I hope you 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