Crouton in Hexxeh's Vanilla Chromium Build

I now have the Acer C7 Chromebook which is a great second device to have offering a nice screen in a highly portable 11 inch, 3 pound package.  If you would like a little more functionality, you can install on your Acer C7 Crouton, a change root (chroot) Ubuntu environment which provides easy switching between Chrome OS and Ubuntu.  I like to try things in a virtual machine before going on the real deal.  Crouton requires developer mode which will erase the user accounts before you enter into it.  I do have many things setup such as OpenVPN and many images stored locally. The Virtualbox configuration will let me play around enough to really determine if I will try out Crouton on my Chromebook.

Garbage Output

You can play around with Crouton in a virtual machine before trying it on your Chromebook and  I have found it works fine, as expected, but the screen changed modes to the hideous garbage on the left during the install and the good news is there is no need to worry. I pressed CTRL-ALT-F2 followed by CTRL--ALT-F1 to get the screen back to normal.  So, install Chromium using Hexxeh's instructions on his site. Then follow the Crouton install guide and if you get the garbage screen, you'll know what to do.

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Chromium Crosh

Here is the CTRL-ALT-F1, or normal Chrome OS view showing Crosh in developer mode shell right after entering the Crouton change root (chroot) environment.

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Here is the screen of CTRL-ALT-F2

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Crouton Xfce4 in Virtualbox

Here is the Xfce4 session running in Crouton.  Note that switching between windows doesn't always work.  Sometimes getting here requires CTRL-ALT-F2 and then CTRL-ALT-F3. 

Have fun!

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