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    Can’t open your Project Crostini container Terminal? Here’s how to get access

    Kevin TofelBy Kevin TofelMay 16, 2018No Comments2 Mins Read
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    Lo and behold, I made an unintended mistake today and lost the ability to use the Terminal for Linux apps on my Pixelbook. It turns out that you can manually update the Linux container component by typing chrome://components in your browser bar and selecting the Update option for the cros-termina component.

    Chrome components

    Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. As I, and several others on Reddit found out, the latest version of cros-termina sort of breaks the ability to run the Terminal app on a Chromebook. When I click the Terminal app to open it, it appears and then disappears. Fret not because there’s a solution. And to be honest, the Chromium team is already working on a fix.

    Until that happens, following these steps will get you back into your Linux apps on Chrome OS, which of course is only in the Dev Channel for now.

    1. Press ctrl+alt+t to open the standard crosh shell in a browser tab.
    2. Type vsh <vm_name>, where vm_name is very likely termina by default.
    3. Type  lxc exec <container_name> — /bin/login -f <username>. The default container_name should be penguin and the username is whatever user name you used to set up your container in the first place. For me that was kctofel.

    What should happen — or at least what happens for me — is the container opens, but not in the Terminal app. Instead you’ll see the Linux environment in crosh, however, it works the same as in Terminal.

    Crostini terminal in crosh

    It’s likely we won’t need this workaround for long, but I wrote it up because if there’s ever a future occurrence of this issue, I suspect this same workaround will do the trick.

    Chrome OS Crostini Linux Project Crostini
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    Kevin Tofel
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    After spending 15 years in IT at Fortune 100 companies, Kevin turned a hobby into a career and began covering mobile technology in 2003. He writes daily on the industry and has co-hosted the weekly MobileTechRoundup podcast since 2006. His writing has appeared in print (The New York Times, PC Magazine and PC World) and he has been featured on NBC News in Philadelphia.

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