The internet is wrong and all the tutorials are broken

[dnschneid]

An improvement in Chromium OS security has broken all the internet tutorials for crouton. Oops.

But it's OK, with the power of the internet, we can fix the internet!

If you've found a tutorial that is still listing the old commands (sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton ...), please reach out to the author (nicely!) and ask them to update.

What used to be the following steps (these are now wrong!):

1. Download crouton
2. Run sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton ...

Have become the equally-memorable:

1. Download crouton
2. Prep the installer with sudo install -Dt /usr/local/bin -m 755 ~/Downloads/crouton
3. Run sudo crouton ...

The steps for running chroots off of external media have also become more convoluted. It would be best if tutorials just referred to the README section in that case.

If you find the old steps are still working, it's only because the changes haven't rolled out to you yet. It will. Just you wait. Or don't wait, and instead help make crouton tutorials great again.

Post links here to tutorials you've helped correct for some sweet, sweet recognition!

[justchen1369]

Looks like a good idea is to notify the owners of any broken tutorials and (?) tell them to add the extra step of moving the crouton script to /usr/local.

[DennisLfromGA]

@justchen1369

The README has been updated, everybody reads that right? 😁

Please read the relevant sections of this README carefully, and reach out to your favorite weblogger/tutorialer/videotuber to update their guides if they're behind the times. If you're successful, brag about your accomplishments in the issue tracker and earn the personal gratitude of the crouton authors*!

• limit one (1) gratitude per commenter

-DennisLfromGA

[justchen1369]

Just sent a message to the author of the HowToGeek article on crouton.

[LynWales]

It is really pleasing to hear that Crouton is continuing-I had feared it's demise as Crostini was introduced -Are there any plans to add more up to date Targets-The last Ubuntu distribution I can see is xenial and there have been several new rollouts since then?

[justchen1369]

Buster is available- just plop a -r buster in the command(and others are probably available)

[JL2210]

What changed? Can't we just mount -o remount the home drive temporarily?

[dnschneid]

That would technically work, but it would also bypass many layers of protection in Chromium that prevents random downloaded files (including cached extensions and whatnot) from being executable.

As for what changed, see the first link in this bug.

[justchen1369]

[ErikLentz]

I updated My blog post on setting up Crouton and Steam! It's my most trafficked article, and I can always tell when people have been buying new Chromebooks by the stats bump.

Thanks for the easy steps!

[justchen1369]

thanks for updating it!

[dnschneid]

@smeggysmeg thanks! looks like you need to update the "how to update" steps as well.

[ErikLentz]

Woops. Fixed!