Before we can dive into the wonderful world of Arduino, we will need to prepare our computers to be compatible with these devices.
Unfortunately, the Chromebooks are designed to be very simple machines that connect mainly to the internet. The good news is that this provides us with a really cool opportunity to hack them! Fortunately, while the Chrome OS that comes installed on the Chromebooks is a little too basic, the good people at Google have kept it possible for us to access the hardware and do our own thing.
approx. 10 minutes
Developers are Hackers and Google has created a special place for them. Developer mode is a special environment built into Chrome OS where many of the security restrictions have been removed. This will allow us to install custom software designed by some seriously cool hackers, but it also means that the machines are more vulnerable to security breaches. It's a good thing we're not keeping any personal data on them and we're only using this for learning.
esc+refresh+power
at the same time, keep holding.ctrl+d
then press enter
.enter
;ctrl+d
;approx. 3 minutes
Crouton stands for: ChRomium Os Universal chrooT envirONment. It's a piece of software designed by a staff person at Google that will allow us to install another operating system instead of Chrome. We'll be installing a version of something called Linux
approx. 30 minutes
Now things get trickier...
shell
at the chrosh>
prompt and hit enter
to call the shell prompt;chronos@localhost / $
command line type:sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce
Please specify a username for the primary user:
stemscholar
If you are not already in a chrome browser, open one up! If you are not already in a crosh tab/window, follow the instructions from Step 3 to enter Crosh (hitCtrl + Alt + t
). If you are in Crosh, typeshell
chrosh> prompt and hit enter to call the shell prompt.
Now, we are going to launch a new window manager environment that will run alongside of the Chrome OX window manager you have been using the last three weeks. This new window manager is called xfce4
.
xfce4
will allow us to access the foundational operating system on your chromebook, which is called Linux and the version we will be using is called Ubuntu Linux! This is an operating system like Mac OSX or Microsoft Windows that will allow us to install and run programs. The Chrome OS is based on Linux too.
We will no longer be limited to the ChromeOS programs, we can now use any open source software that we want!
sudo enter-chroot startxfce4
chronos@localhost / $
command line… but DO NOT PRESS ENTER!!!!Make sure to CHECK that there are no spaces between enter, the hyphen and chroot.
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F1
Use default config
.