Brett Israelsen

Some directions on what I did to set up Crouton on my Pixelbook

• Follow directions to get gcloud up and running. Those are basic steps to get my development environment up. This includes git, nvim, texlive, tmux, and julia

There are a couple other nice things:

• For some reason I needed to fix the locale on the xenial machine. This involved following directions from this post

sudo apt-get install locales    
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales   # ... and selected en_US fonts, using *space* to select
multiple. make sure to select ok, by navigating with tab. should be asked to set a default.
select the en_US.UTF-8, and that worked for me

• This page was useful for the initial setup of Crouton. Especially this line of code, which makes xiwi the default when starting xfce4. The problem with the default is that startxfce4 opens in something like a guest screen, totally separate from the main screen. I ran into problems with getting multiple screens, and other things, so using xiwi (i.e. linux windows within chrome-os) makes things pretty nice.This bash sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t xiwi -u -n xenial

• I needed to sudo apt-get install bash-completion to get autocompletion to work for things like apt-get install.
• I manually installed the Hack Nerd font to get special characters (i.e. powerline). Download the font from here
• I got tired of typing sudo startxiwi xfce4-terminal all the time so I added an alias to the crouton shell in the .bashrc. When opening the crouton shell from the chroot it automatically enters the root directory. In order to get to the home directory just type cd. That changes the terminal prompt from chronos@localhost / $ to chronos@localhost ~ $. Once there add alias xterm="sudo startxiwi xfce4-terminal" to the .bashrc file. Next time just type xterm once in the shell and you just saved yourself a bunch of typing.
• Having a bunch of issues with neovim in the terminal and tmux. After looking around I decided to compile and use a later version of xfce4-terminal form here. This page has a list of terminals that support full color, which might also be good options.