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Chromebook Install Instructions

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Bob W. Hogg edited this page Jul 24, 2016 · 1 revision

Believe it or not, you can install Homebrew/Linuxbrew on your shiny new Chromebook without dual-booting or chrooting another operating system like Ubuntu; nay, you can enjoy the goodness of CLI programs like vim, zsh, ruby , and all the other goodies Linuxbrew has to offer (not to mention anything you can compile from source) while still being able to flaunt your fancy Chrome OS GUI. So let's get started.

NOTE STILL IN PROGRESS EVERYTHING SHOULD WORK UNTIL GCC

Disclaimer This guide is still in progress and has only been tested on an Acer C720P, so results may vary with other Chromebooks, especially those with other architectures (sorry ARM).

Prerequisites

If you just opened up your factory-fresh Chromebook, the first thing you have to do is enable developer mode. If that guide doesn't help do a google search for device specific instructions; it shouldn't be too hard.

Next, you're probably gonna want to install Secure Shell so you can get at Crosh Window. This way you can have multiple windows.

Now that we have a terminal we can really get crackin'.

Chromebrew

There are a couple of obstacles to installing Linuxbrew, or even anything at all, on a Chromebook. First of all, you have very limited permissions. Even with sudo, you only have write permissions in your home folder, /home/chronos/user, and /usr/local. To make matters worse, you can't execute anything in your home folder; it has to be in /usr/local. Not even with chmod +x, the problem is with the permissions it is mounted with by the Chrome OS system. One solution is to disable rootfs verification, but if we are clever, we don't have to be so heavy handed.

The other main issue is that Chrome OS currently does not ship with a compiler, which makes building anything from source impossible. Luckily, the folks over at Chromebrew, which is a package manager exclusively for Chromebooks, cross-compiled the whole gcc toolchain, as well as some other stuff like ruby and git. We're going to use that to bootstrap our Linuxbrew installation, and then install new versions of everything using Linuxbrew so we can delete Chromebrew completely by the end.

Enough talk, let's do. Install Chromebrew with

wget -q -O - https://raw.github.com/skycocker/chromebrew/master/install.sh | bash
sudo chown -R chronos:chronos /usr/local

This may take a while depending on your internet speed. When it's done, restart your Chromebook (it only takes 10 seconds!). I'm not sure why this is necessary, but whenever there's a weird problem it's usually because I forgot to restart after I installed Chromebrew.

Linuxbrew Setup

You're back? Let's get Linuxbrew going right away.

export prefix=/usr/local/linuxbrew
git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/linuxbrew.git $prefix

We need to symlink our Chromebrew gcc so Linuxbrew can use it.

mkdir $prefix/lib
ln -s $(which gcc) $prefix/bin/gcc-$(gcc -dumpversion | cut -d. -f1,2)
ln -s $(which g++) $prefix/bin/g++-$(g++ -dumpversion | cut -d. -f1,2)

Now we need to create a temporary directory for Linuxbrew special because the default location is /tmp, and we don't have write permissions there.

mkdir $prefix/tmp
export HOMEBREW_TEMP=$prefix/tmp

Now we need to modify our environment a bit to make Linuxbrew happy. I repeated some commands because they need to be run for every new terminal session, so either copy-paste each time or edit your .bash_profile.

export prefix=/usr/local/linuxbrew # wherever you want linuxbrew, but it better be somewhere in /usr/local
PATH="$prefix/bin:$prefix/sbin:$PATH"
export HOMEBREW_TEMP=$prefix/tmp
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Let's see if everything is working. For now to make gcc work right we need to temporarily set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
brew install hello && brew test hello && brew remove hello
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

If everything is working that should produce something along the lines of

=> Downloading http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /home/chronos/user/.cache/Homebrew/hello-2.10.tar.gz
==> ./configure --disable-silent-rules --prefix=/usr/local/linuxbrew/Cellar/hello/2.10
==> make install
/usr/local/linuxbrew/Cellar/hello/2.10: 52 files, 692K, built in 18 seconds
Testing hello
==> /usr/local/linuxbrew/Cellar/hello/2.10/bin/hello --next-generation --greeting=brew
Uninstalling /usr/local/linuxbrew/Cellar/hello/2.10...

Now we need to modify some of the more vital programs we just installed so they always know where to look for libraries. They usually taking cues from the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but Linuxbrew doesn't work well if LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set. Instead, we'll tell them where to find libraries by setting the rpath using patchelf, but first we have to install it.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
brew install patchelf
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

You should now have the patchelf command. Now use it to set the rpath of gcc and ruby, which are vital to Linuxbrew and Chromebrew.

patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/bin/gcc
patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/bin/g++
patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/libexec/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.8.1/cc1
patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/libexec/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.8.1/cc1plus
patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/bin/ruby
patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/x86_64-linux/digest/sha1.so
patchelf --set-rpath /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib/ruby/2.0.0/x86_64-linux/digest/sha2.so

Now everything should be working without pesky LD_LIBRARY_PATH

brew install hello && brew test hello && brew remove hello

Our Very Own Toolchain

We're doing alright, but to be honest, Linuxbrew and Chromebrew's toolchain aren't crazy about each other. Let's install a new one with Linuxbrew now that we have it functioning. The lines are separated based into programs and their dependencies, but as long as you preserve the order, you can combine all those brew install yadayadas if you feel like it.

brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install diffutils binutils # SEE NOTES ON BOTTOM
brew install m4 gmp
brew install gpatch flex bison libmpc
brew install mpfr

brew install gawk glibc
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 brew postinstall glibc
brew unlink glibc

ln -s /lib64/libz.so.1 /usr/local/linuxbrew/lib/
brew install zlib
rm /usr/local/linuxbrew/lib/libz.so.1
brew link zlib

Now we have all the prerequisites for gcc, but first we need to reinstall everything so that it will link with the glibc we just installed.

brew list | grep -v "glibc\|zlib" | xargs brew reinstall # takes a long time to reinstall everything
brew link glibc

Now we're ready to install gcc.

ln -s /usr/local/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 /usr/local/linuxbrew/lib/
brew install gcc --with-glibc -v
rm /usr/local/linuxbrew/lib/libstdc++.so.6
brew link gcc
export HOMEBREW_CC=gcc-4.9
brew install hello && brew test hello && brew remove hello

Now we're almost done. We just need a few more things that Chromebrew provides, like perl, ruby, and git that are vital to Linuxbrew.

brew install perl
brew install tcl-tk --without-tk
brew install curl expat git
brew install bzip2 coreutils findutils gawk gnu-sed gnu-which grep libpng libxml2 libxslt make ncurses readline texinfo --default-names --with-default-names
ln -s ncursesw/curses.h ncursesw/ncurses.h ncursesw/term.h ncursesw/termcap.h $prefix/include/
brew install ruby
brew install python

Now we can remove the old Chromebrew stuff.

cd /usr/local/
ls | grep -v "linuxbrew" | xargs rm -rf
brew install hello && brew test hello && brew remove hello

If you want you can symlink everything into /usr/local, because if you actually move it all the rpaths are wrong.

ln -s linuxbrew/* /usr/local

Notes

Clone this wiki locally