Another Way to Install Linux Apps on Chromebook

hey welcome back to the channel so a little while ago i did a video on how to install a couple of app stores on your chromebook i'll put a link up in the corner and down in the description if you want to check those out but today i'm going to be showing you another method for getting linux apps on your chromebook and that is using flat packs flat pack is just a way of packaging and deploying a linux application that makes it very easy to install that application regardless of what version of linux you're using and that includes the native linux support in chrome os once we get everything set up you just install the application with one single command and then it puts it in the start menu you can launch it just like any other app and it functions just like any other application on your chromebook now recently there's been some issues getting flat packs to work in chrome os i've overcome one of those issues and i'm going to show you in this tutorial so even if you've done this before make sure you watch the whole thing because i may have answered one of the issues that you were having when you tried this before so with that all out of the way let's jump onto the chromebook and i'll show you how this is done all right so here we are on the chromebook and the first thing we need to do is set up the linux support now if you already have this set up on your system you can just skip to the next section i'll put some chapter markers down below so let's get into this and just click down by the clock and then just go into the settings wheel and then we're just going to search for linux in here so we can see here this developer section the linux development environment we're going to turn that on and then just go through the steps here we'll hit next you can name it whatever you want you can use the recommended size or you can change a custom size i'm going to make this just a little bit bigger do around 25 gigs or so and then hit install now this is going to take a few minutes to set up it's just setting up that linux environment and then we'll come back when this is all done okay so that installation is all done and when it's done it's going to pop up this terminal window this is a linux terminal so what we're going to do is we're going to look for updates and we do that by typing in sudo apt update give that just a few seconds it's going to go and look for packages that need to be updated you can see that we have 25 packages that can be upgraded so we're going to do sudo apt upgrade and that's just going to upgrade our system with those latest versions of the system files so just let that run it takes just a minute or so and then we'll come back again okay so we have linux installed it's all updated and we are ready to set up the flat pack support it does not come pre-installed out of the box but it's super easy to set up all we're going to do is type in sudo apt install flat pack and all these commands i type i'll have them down in the description below um so this is just set telling us what packages that have found that flat pack is uh requires and we're gonna go ahead and hit yes to install all those now give it just a minute this is a pretty quick install um so once this is set up we'll have flat pack support but we won't have access to install any applications because we need to add a repository now repository is basically just a database of all the applications that are set up to use flat pack and it tells us where to find it and where to install it so we have to set up a repository now we're going to set up the flat hub repository i'm going to go out to my notes and just cheat here and copy this so we're going to run this command flat pack user remote add if not exists flat hub and then the path again i'll have this down in the description but all this is doing is saying that we're going to add the flat hub repository if it doesn't already exist and then this is the path to the flat hub repository so we're going to copy that go back to our terminal and just paste it in there and now we have that repository all set and we're ready to install applications from from flathub so we're going to go out to the flathub site which is just flathub.org so let me go back to the home page so when you go to flat hub.org you're gonna come to this page and you can click here to browse the applications you can browse through the categories if you know there's a specific application that you want you can click this little button up here and locate it so you know say we're going through the categories and we want to install solitaire we can go click on the application and then it brings us to this install page now this install button isn't going to work because linux is kind of running in a separate container on our chromebook and we are in chrome outside of that container so there's no real link between here and there but all we need to do is just scroll to the bottom here and we can see this install command all this is going to do is tell flat pack how to install this version of solitaire so we're just going to clip the click this button to copy it into the clipboard we're going to go back to our terminal window and just right click that's going to paste it into our linux terminal window and then hit enter now this is saying that it went out there and it found the application that we're looking for we're going to hit yes to install it this is everything that it needs to make that application work again we're going to click yes to install it and don't worry all the stuff you're clicking yes to in here is perfectly safe flat hub is a huge repository that's widely used it's completely safe you're not going to install anything illegal or any viruses or anything like that on your system so don't worry about any of that we're just going to let this run for a little bit and then when it's all done i'll come back again okay so there we are the application is all installed now there's two ways we can launch it one is if we go back to this web page we can copy this command to run it or if we go into our application menu scroll to the bottom in our linux apps folder you're gonna see that it automatically puts a link or the application in there now if this is the first time that you're installing a flat pack on your system i would recommend that you run this command because there may be an issue that we're probably going to run into in a second here and i'm going to show you how to fix that but you only have to do it once so if we just copy this to copy it into our clipboard again go back to our terminal and paste that in go ahead and try to run this yeah so this is the error that i was thinking that we were going to have and this is one that i've seen a lot of people post about and not a lot of posts on how to fix this so we are going to fix this issue right now and it's relatively easy to do again i will have information on how to do this down in the description but let's jump in and fix this right away so to fix this we're just going to click on a chrome window we're going to hit control alt t on our keyboard that brings us into kind of another terminal window but this is not the linux terminal window this is for your chromebook and we need this because we're going to modify the container that linux is running in so first of all we're going to type in vsh termina and then we're going to type kind of a long command again so i'm going to cheat a little bit again and go to my notes we're going to type in lxc config set penguin security.nesting true so that is just going to change some of the security for our container and let us run those flat packs so i'm just going to copy that and then paste it in here hit enter and then all we need to do now is restart our chromebook so i'm going to do that and then when i come back we'll pick up the video again okay so we're freshly rebooted and back on our uh desktop here so we're just going to go in and because we have that flat pack fixed we should be able to launch it from the link so i'm just going to go into linux apps into the io riot solitaire and see if that launches and it did so now this is our linux version of this isle riot solitaire game we can play this so if we you know move the nine over and six um this works just fine you can install all kinds of applications from here if we go back out to the flat hub site you can go and search and install any applications you want you know say we wanted to do the image editor we could do that there is a version of caden live which is a fantastic video editor that's in here too we can install that through flat hub it just makes it super easy to install and if we want to do one of these other ones all we need to do is just run this install command from the terminal and then it's going to show up in our application launcher under the linux apps we'll just see whatever applications we installed super easy and they run just like any other application on your chromebook so there you go we have everything set up and again whenever you want to install an application just find it out in flat hub paste that install command in and it'll show up just like any other app now keep in mind that the linux support in chrome os is not 100 compatible with every application so some applications just aren't going to work but uh vast majority of the ones that i've tried that of course aren't graphically heavy or anything like that work just fine so experiment with it and find out what applications work for you thanks so much for watching i hope you found this useful or informative if you did hit that thumbs up if you really liked it and you want to see more hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so you can get notified when i put out more videos thanks so much for stopping by and i'll see in the next one

Channel: Eevnos

Views: 42,129

Keywords: another way to install linux apps on chromebook, flatpak chromebook, how to install flatpaks on chromebook, how to install linux apps on chromebook, install flatpak on, install flatpak on chromebook, install linux apps on chrome os, install linux apps on chromebook, linux

Id: HGf10csP91I

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022