Chrome / Linux

failure to update debian linux on a lenovo ip flex 5 chromebook

whbeebe3 Comments

I’ve written in the past that I own a Lenovo IP Flex 5 Chromebook. I do a lot of regular typing on it, such as posts for this blog (like this very one right now). For a standard Chromebook I believe the Lenovo can’t be beat. It’s solid as the proverbial rock. But when I start to stray outside its primary mission, it begins to have some issues. One such issue concerns upgrading Debian Linux from buster to bullseye.

The Lenovo provides the ability to run Debian Linux inside a VM on the Chromebook. Debian is presented as a standard bash shell with no graphical applications. After all, the GUI is provided by ChomeOS and the Chrome browser. The Linux VM is running Debian 10/buster, which you can check by just typing cat /etc/os-release at the command line.

For a Chromebook, that’s perfectly acceptable. But I discovered through my readings on the internets that there’s a new update for Debian on the Chromebook, Debian 11/bullseye. I thought that might be nice to have, so I attempted to run the update through Chrome.  Twice. Both times the update failed. The following is a screen capture of a portion of the output log from the second failed update attempt.

The message “Failed to connect to bus” is sprinkled through the log file. I have some idea what might be the problem, but I don’t feel motivated to go track this down and possibly fix it. I guess I’m lazy. There’s nothing wrong with Debian 10, it’s more than good enough. But I’m always going to be attracted to the new and shiny things of this world, such as operating system updates like Debian 11. So I’ll just wait and see if it gets fixed sometime in the future. Until then I’ll carry on with buster and chill out.

3 thoughts on “failure to update debian linux on a lenovo ip flex 5 chromebook”

  1. When I saw that chromebooks can run Linux I was enthused. Until I started reading about experiences like this. It’s sort of almost-but-not-quite Linux isn’t it? How much better if they had just outfitted them with a functional standard version of Linux to begin with instead of the pseudo-Debian thing that is Chrome OS. The old netbooks were better.

    Liked by 1 person

    • I remember the netbook, specifically the Asus Eee. They were lethargic with keyboards that were only 85% the size of regular keyboards. Their installed Linux distributions left a lot to be desired, even for that period of time. I eventually switched to Chrome OS in or around 2012 right after it was released as a more suitable OS for the netbooks at the time.

      This Lenovo has a backlit keyboard, 128GB SSD, 8GB of ram, and an 11th Gen Intel quad-core i3-1115G4 @ 3.00GHz. It’s speedy with a full sized keyboard, and if I can’t upgrade to bullseye I’m quite capable of living within buster. I even have Visual Studio Code installed and running, using it for Python hacking. My only complaint about the Debian VM is I can only see USB devices plugged into it, which given the other benefits of this machine, isn’t something I won’t loose any sleep over. For what it can do this Debian is more than complete enough for me.

      Compared to what I have today in the Lenovo, I would never go back to any of the netbooks from the last decade. Never.

      Like

      • I was thinking more along the lines of chromebooks becoming better netbooks; the next generation. Instead their limitation built in to the OS makes them not worthy successors. I had two Acer netbooks and although tiny and underpowered (at least by today’s standards) they could do anything a regular laptop could, just in a smaller footprint.

        Like

Comments are closed.