by

How to run Fedora instead of Debian

Move the debian container out of the way

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to bring up crosh (Chrome OS Developer Shell)

vsh termina
lxc stop penguin --force
lxc rename penguin debian

Create the Fedora container

lxc launch images:fedora/31 penguin

Replace systemd-networkd if networking is broken

If you find you are unable to access the internet take these steps to replace systemd-networkd.

dhclient
dnf -y install NetworkManager
systemctl disable systemd-networkd
systemctl disable systemd-resolved
systemctl enable NetworkManager
unlink /etc/resolv.conf

Stop and start the container to verify it comes up with a working network stack and proceed.

Setup

exec into the container
lxc exec penguin -- bash

install cros-guest-tools
dnf -y install sudo cros-guest-tools

Create user (match your Chrome OS username)
useradd $username

Enable sudo for your user
groupadd sudo
usermod -aG sudo $username

Enable linger for your user
systemctl unmask systemd-logind
loginctl enable-linger $username

Enable integration services
systemctl enable cros-sftp
sudo su - $username
systemctl --user enable sommelier@0 sommelier-x@0 sommelier@1 sommelier-x@1 cros-garcon cros-pulse-config

After 13 Jun 2020 this will be:

systemctl --user enable sommelier@0 sommelier-x@0 sommelier@1 sommelier-x@1 cros-garcon pulseaudio

Restart Fedora

Right click the Terminal app and choose Shut Down Linux (Beta).

Start the container again by clicking on the Terminal app. After a moment you should get a terminal to your new container with functionaing integration.

Use Chrome as the default browser

If you’d like to change the default browser for Linux applications to the ChromeOS Chrome edit .config/mimeapps.list and add the following entries

[Default Applications]
text/html=garcon_host_browser.desktop
application/xhtml+xml=garcon_host_browser.desktop
x-scheme-handler/http=garcon_host_browser.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=garcon_host_browser.desktop

Fix audio after 13 Jun 2020

You may have had working or intermittently working audio which suddenly changed to never working audio. The flaky cros-pulse-config service was replaced with configuration files that are dropped in place when you create a new user account. For an already existing user account you need to:
cp /etc/skel/.config/pulse/d* ~/.config/pulse
systemctl --user enable pulseaudio
After stop the Linux container, start it again, and audio should be working.

Upgrading between releases

Doing upgrades between releases in a container can present a minor challenge. Because /sys and /proc are mounted into the container they are read only to the container and because the VM hosting the container is not running the distro the permissions are different from what Fedora expects. When the filesystem package tries to install if will fail because it can’t update these permissions to what it specifies they should be. Therefore before starting an update you may wish to take some steps to make the process go smoother. Effectively what we do is install the RPM using cpio and then update db in separate steps to reflect that.

Perform a backup before performing these steps.

rpm -e --justdb filesystem --nodeps #(–justdb is EXTREMELY important for this step, excluding it will have catrastrophic results)
dnf -y install 'dnf-command(download)'
dnf download filesystem --releasever=31
rpm2cpio filesystem-3.12-2.fc31.x86_64.rpm > filesystem.cpio
rpm -ivh --justdb filesystem-3.12-2.fc31.x86_64.rpm
pushd /
cpio -ivd < ~/filesystem.cpio
popd

At this point if you run the following command you should see that pretty much all files and directories verify except the user and group permissions on those we epect:
rpm --verify filesystem-3.12-2.fc31.x86_64

Continue with an update:
dnf -y update --releasever=31
dnf -y distro-sync

BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1589968

 Share!