Crouton Quick Start

All sudo commands must be executed from VT-2 (Frecon). But Frecon doesn't support an Xsession, so you have to ssh into your chroot from the crosh shell, then start an Xsession from inside your chroot. That is, all host startup commands, except for startcli, are no longer supported. In this tutorial, I specify the xfce desktop. You can also try gnome, but I would leave the others alone. I also specify the focal release, but you can try bullseye. It is understood that all commands are executed by pressing the Enter key.

Switch to VT-2 (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and login as chronos.

1. Download crouton from Crouton Main Page.
2. Make crouton executable: sudo install -Dt /usr/local/bin -m 755 ~/Downloads/crouton
3. Install the crouton extension from Crouton Extension
4. Install xfce: sudo CROUTON_BRANCH=silence crouton -r focal -t core,audio,cli-extra,x11,gtk-extra,xorg,keyboard,extension,xfce
5. After providing your user name and password, enter your chroot: sudo enter-chroot
6. Install and run ssh: sudo apt install ssh, then sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start.
7. Remain in your chroot, and switch over to the crosh shell with Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-T, and type shell.
8. Type ssh foo@localhost (foo is your username).
9. Open a terminal and type startxfce4.
10. Do first time things, etc.

To get out of everything, exit the desktop from the taskbar menu, then press Ctrl-D. Switch back over to VT-2 and press Ctrl-D. Some stuff can be automated, like including the ssh start command in rc.local. You can also fork your chroot into the background indefinitely with the following command:

sudo enter-chroot -b sleep inf

To terminate the chroot, use sudo unmount-chroot focal -f -y

If you wish, you can use xenial instead of focal, but I recommend the latter. Even though it's not officially supported, it works really well: it's what I'm using currently.

One more thing: After installing the secure shell extension from the webstore (search ssh, be sure to install the one by Google), you can go right into the omni bar and type

ssh foo@localhost

The first time, it will ask if you want to capture the password. From then on, just ssh from the omni bar and enter your password. The crosh shell is not even needed!