Continued Chromebook Coding Adventures
I have written previously about the joys on setting up a development environment on my Chromebook. Overall, the experience hasn’t been too bad, however I was faced with a challenge this past week when I was going through my usual routine of opening up a project to mess around with an old project and all of the sudden, nothing was working. I had the file open already in VSCode from the previous day, and so I switched over to that tab, entered old faithful, “xdg-open main.html”, in the terminal, and was surprised to find that this command no longer worked! So I did what any normal person would do, and went to close down the applications, and try it from the beginning. However, upon closing down my terminal and VSCode, when I attempted to reopen the terminal, it would not cooperate; it just refused to get started.
From there, the next step that I had to try was a restart of the computer. I wouldn’t be bothering to write this if that had worked, so obviously that also did not have the result I was hoping for. I was still unable to run the terminal, or access any of my saved Linux files through the files application that is installed on the computer. At this point I was starting to get a little bit worried, as most of the suggestions online for those in similar situations said to do a “powerwash” of the computer, which is just a factory reset. Now, none of the files that I have stored on the computer are irreplaceable, and most are simply backed up online at Google Docs or Github, but the thought of having to go through the process of setting up a development environment on the computer again was not appealing, but I certainly felt like it might not be a case of if I would have to do it, but when I would have to do it.
Guide after guide, hard to understand terminal command after hard to understand terminal command, I attempted to resolve my issue. However, at a certain point, I decided to cut my losses. I noticed that in the computer settings, there is an option to back up the linux files. I thought this would be perfect for me, since once I would get the system up and running again, I could simply access the backup, rather than having to start from scratch. But, in sticking with the same theme from earlier, clicking this option yielded no results. Same for the option titled “Remove Linux from Chromebook,” which I would assume allows the user to remove Linux without having to to do the full factory reset. Like I said earlier, I don’t keep anything critical on this computer, but still, who wants to factory reset their own computer?
Nevertheless, I ended up doing the “powerwash” of my computer. Thankfully, once the reset was completed, I was able to refer back to some previous posts of mine while setting up the development environment. Altogether, this was a rather inexpensive lesson for me to learn — I didn’t lose anything except for time. Linux for the chromebook is still in Beta, so it should not have been a surprise for me when this issue occurred, but it is certainly something that I’ll need to keep in mind going forward.
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/using-lxd-on-your-chromebook/3823
