Chromebook / Chrome OS Developer Mode Abilities

Question

I’m thinking of getting myself a Chromebook (running Chrome OS of course) but need to fully understand the developer mode. I’m struggling to find any concrete up to date information as to the developer modes abilities. Once I have entered developer mode and mounted the rootfs as writable (both of which are relatively straight forward) will the Chromebook/Chrome OS function relatively normally? By normal I mean can I install and run standard Linux binaries assuming they have been complied for the target architecture? I read somewhere that actually compiling from source on the Chromebook/OS was a no go. Why is this?

Answer 1

Once you are in developer mode you can go and have freedom to do many things on your Chromebook (or any other chromeOS machine). For example if you take this project: https://github.com/helloandre/cr48

and follow these steps:

• Put your CR-48 in developer mode drop into a shell (Ctrl+Alt+t)
• Make your main partition executable with sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user
• Download this repo to a different computer, then use scp to put it to /home/chronos/user/cr48 cd /home/chronos/user/cr48 && chmod +x install && ./install

You could enjoy development technologies like: python, ruby, perl etc'.

Answer 2

Once you've put your device in developer mode, it's essentially a Linux box just like any other. Depending on how heavyweight your "standard linux binary" is, it'll most likely just work; the problems you'll have are going to be of the "library X isn't installed by default" variety you might get from any other distro, not the "ChromeOS is so weird that nothing will ever work" kind.

You won't be building software on the Chromebook itself, unless you install GCC and the related toolchain -- you'll need to set up the development environment on a separate machine; see: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os. You should probably be advised that this is not trivial, and a good 'net pipe and development machine is recommended.

Answer 3

I use my Samsung ChromeBook as an on-the-road PC and Linux on the desktops.

Once you put the CB into developer mode it works like any other Linux server. The security extensions generally mean that you have to put executable programs into /usr/local/bin otherwise they might not be permitted to run.

I'm running Go development environment on it and it runs as fast as any Intel based notebook. For more details on getting Go running on CB, please see this answer.

You can also cross-compile Go from other systems, e.g. a Mac running on Intel processor can generate code for CB, i.e. running Linux on ARM v7. For more details Dave Cheney's article is really helpful.