Crouton: Xenial is a little dated, but nothing else seems to work.

Created on 31 Mar 2020  Â·  14Comments  Â·  Source: dnschneid/crouton

Hey Croutoners,

I really love Crouton, but I was wondering about the ubuntu targets for it.

I'm not especially techie, learning to use Linux and doing some ricing on the side as I learn.

I can never get Eoan or even Bionic to install using Crouton. I can get Xenial going, then upgrade to Bionic, but it often breaks things during the upgrade process.

Mostly my question boils down to this:
What's the plan for Crouton in the future? I know Crostini exists, but it's just not up to par with Crouton. Will 18.04 bionic be fixed? Are there plans to get 20.04 working when it releases?

Is there anything i can learn to solve in order to help things along?

question

Most helpful comment

I'd also like to know some stuff about this as well.

All 14 comments

I'd also like to know some stuff about this as well.

stretch and buster worked for me.

stretch and buster worked for me.

@straverscornelis How did you get them running (what cmds) I only know how to get xenial stuff.

@chaseboy100,

You can install different releases/distros by specifying them with the '-r [RELEASE]' option when you install your crouton chroot. Below are all the candidates that crouton can install -

sudo crouton -r list

Recognized debian releases:
    potato! woody! sarge! etch! lenny! squeeze! wheezy! jessie stretch buster
    bullseye sid
Recognized kali releases:
    moto! kali! sana! kali-rolling
Recognized ubuntu releases:
    warty! hoary! breezy! dapper! edgy! feisty! gutsy! hardy! intrepid! jaunty!
    karmic! lucid! maverick! natty! oneiric! precise! quantal! raring! saucy!
    trusty! utopic! vivid! wily! xenial yakkety! zesty! artful! bionic* cosmic!
    disco* eoan*

Releases marked with ! are upstream end-of-life, and should be avoided.
Releases marked with * are unsupported, but may work with some effort.

So, to install the Debian buster release start the command with the following:

  • sudo crouton -r buster -t [targets]

Note 1: heed the warnings about releases that are end-of-life or unsupported above.
Note 2: the chroot name will be the release name by default
Note 3: substitute the targets / desktops you want in [targets] above.

Hope this helps,
-DennisLfromGA

the steps i followed are these:
1) download crouton to downloads with chrome in GUI in developer mode
1) enter command mode in developer mode
2) : shell
3) to get a writable area: cd ~
4) download the bootstrap: sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -d -f
~/Downloads/buster.tar.bz2 -r buster
5) make crouton executable: chmod a+x ~/Downloads/crouton
6) download and create the chroot: sudo ~/Downloads/crouton -r buster -t
xfce
7) create user for debian buster
9) launch debian buster: sudo startxfce4

correction, my dyslexia got me.

the steps i followed are these:
1) download crouton to downloads with chrome in GUI in developer mode
1) enter command mode in developer mode
2) : shell
3) to get a writable area: cd ~
4) make crouton executable: chmod a+x ~/Downloads/crouton
5) download the bootstrap: sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -d -f
~/Downloads/buster.tar.bz2 -r buster
6) download and create the chroot: sudo ~/Downloads/crouton -r buster -t
xfce
7) create user for debian buster
9) launch debian buster: sudo startxfce4

On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 3:55 PM Cornelis Stravers <
[email protected]> wrote:

the steps i followed are these:
1) download crouton to downloads with chrome in GUI in developer mode
1) enter command mode in developer mode
2) : shell
3) to get a writable area: cd ~
4) download the bootstrap: sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -d -f
~/Downloads/buster.tar.bz2 -r buster
5) make crouton executable: chmod a+x ~/Downloads/crouton
6) download and create the chroot: sudo ~/Downloads/crouton -r buster -t
xfce
7) create user for debian buster
9) launch debian buster: sudo startxfce4

@straverscornelis,

Your installation method is out of date since noexec mounts have been implemented.

Check out https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton#usage

If you're just here to use crouton, you can grab the latest release from https://goo.gl/fd3zc. Download it, pop open a shell (Ctrl+Alt+T, type shell and hit enter), make the installer executable with sudo install -Dt /usr/local/bin -m 755 ~/Downloads/crouton, then launch it with sudo crouton to see the help text.
See the "examples" section for some usage examples.

Hope this helps,
-DennisLfromGA

I've tried all of the more recent distributions today.

  • Eoan and Disco failed to install- I left the script running overnight and it never finished installation
  • Buster and Stretch installed, but ran extremely poorly
  • Sid installed, but failed to boot and required a hard power off to recover
  • Kali-rolling also failed to install

I'm currently letting my machine chug and try again to install Eoan and see if it's just a matter of giving it more than the 8 hours I gave it previously (I am dubious).

The primary use case for me is a piece of software that depends on a package not present in Xenial, so without a way to resolve this basically means I have to switch back to chrx (which is its own substantial set of headaches).

Hey @loopgru,

One thing you CAN do that has worked for me is to upgrade xenial to bionic. After a xenial install, make sure everything is up to date.

sudo do-release-upgrade will get things going, follow the prompts and wait for the downloads and you'll have a mostly clean upgrade to bionic. IIRC, when it asked me things about keeping users, I just defaulted all of them (i.e. pushed enter) and didn't have any issues.

One thing to note: do not upgrade to eoan. It seems to break the ability to launch the x11 or something, and I haven't found a way around it. If you do want to mess with it, you'll have to change a release-upgrades file in /etc/ somewhere in order to do so.

I'll give it a shot- thank you!

@loopgru , what do you mean Debian Stretch runs extremely poorly? I've been running it for a while now and haven't had a major problem yet. I understand the Buster problem though, #4242 .

On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 8:39 PM kingliamb notifications@github.com wrote:

@loopgru https://github.com/loopgru , what do you mean Debian Stretch
runs extremely poorly? I've been running it for a while now and haven't had
a major problem yet. I understand the Buster problem though, #4242
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/4242 .

—
You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/4248#issuecomment-616882080,
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.

For me both buster and stretch worked ok. It was ChromeOS that clobbered
crouton for no clear reason. Even logging off would mess up the chariot.
Very frustrating.

On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 9:33 PM Cornelis Stravers <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
>

On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 8:39 PM kingliamb notifications@github.com
wrote:

@loopgru https://github.com/loopgru , what do you mean Debian Stretch
runs extremely poorly? I've been running it for a while now and haven't had
a major problem yet. I understand the Buster problem though, #4242
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/4242 .

—
You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/4248#issuecomment-616882080,
or unsubscribe
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AOWFX2RHJ2CZZ43S6POW4MDRNTTKZANCNFSM4LXEOFTQ
.

For me both buster and stretch worked ok. It was ChromeOS that clobbered
crouton for no clear reason. Even logging off would mess up the chariot.
Very frustrating.

Not chariot, chroot. I hate auto correct

Even though the issue was closed, the main questions were not answered. 😕

I'd really like to know about them.

What's the plan for Crouton in the future? [...] Will 18.04 bionic be fixed? Are there plans to get 20.04 working when it releases?

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