Category: Chrome

running with debian 11/bullseye on a chromebook when update doesn’t work

whbeebe

In an earlier post I wrote about my frustration of trying to update a Chromebook Linux container from Debian 10/Buster to Debian 11/Bullseye. No matter how many fora messages I checked or how many how-to or technical blog postings I read, absolutely none of them worked. Then one evening, while looking at Chrome’s chrome://flags, I discovered an important setting (I’m writing about Version 100.0.4896.133).

Figure 1: chrome://flags

Figure 1 shows what my Chrome flags are set to. The critical flag is “Debian version for new Crostini containers.” Mine is deliberately set by me to Bullseye, or Debian 11. If it’s left to Default then it will be Debian 10. I took a second Lenovo Chromebook I have, set that flag, deleted the existing Debian 10 container, and then created a new container. Sure enough when I opened the container’s terminal and checked I was running Debian 11.

Right after this I updated Debian 11 to make sure I had all the latest software. Rather than wipe and reload on my primary Chromebook, I’m going to turn on another flag, “Allow multiple Chrostini containers,” and create a second container running Debian 11. If that works then I’ll try to “migrate” from my existing Debian 10 container over to my new Debian 11 container, then delete the Debian 10 container. Or maybe just keep both. I don’t know at this point.

For the future, at least for me, I’ll set the container Debian version explicitly up to the highest level allowed before I create a Debian Linux container.

Update 3 May

I went looking for a way to create a second Debian Linux container and couldn’t find anything. So I guess I won’t be doing that. That leaves the re-create the container method as the only viable method to date.

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.