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ChromeOS Linux Settings

Your device supports the ability to run Linux applications within ChromeOS. This opens the door to running thousands of desktop applications. ChromeOS's Linux implementation is primarily intended for use by those who wish to use their ChromeOS Device to develop software. However, many other users may benefit from Linux support. The settings for your Linux environment can be found in the ChromeOS settings application.

Manage Shared Folders

Adding Linux file shares is easily done via the ChromeOS File Manager, but if you wish to remove file shares from your Linux environment, this is best done from the Manage Shared Folders menu.

Manage USB Devices

ChromeOS allows you to pass various USB devices into your Linux environment such as Android phones, programmable microcontrollers and more. Please see the list of tested USB devices and known limitations here.

Backup and Restore

It is important to maintain backups of your Linux environment, and ChromeOS makes this process easy. You can use backups to restore your Linux environment to a working state if you perform a change that impacts the stability of your Linux environment or if you wish to migrate your Linux environment to a new machine in the future.

Important Notes - There are a few things to keep in mind regarding Linux backups on ChromeOS.

  • Your backups are not encrypted, so they should be stored in a secure location, preferably on a secure network storage device or encrypted hard drive. Your backups may contain sensitive content such as signing keys, ssh keys and private keys.

  • Backups can only be performed to a local disk or disk directly connected to your device. If you attempt to back up your Linux environment to a remote file share or cloud storage system, it will fail. If you wish to store your backups on a remote system, preform the backup to a local disk and move it to the remote file system when the backup has been completed.

  • You may restore your backups onto another ChromeOS device, but it must match the architecture of your device.

  • At this time, the ChromeOS Linux Backup tool will only back up the main "penguin" container within the Termina Virtual Machine. If you have created additional containers or additional virtual machines, they will not be included in the backups generated with this tool.

Develop Android Apps

This setting will enable the sideloading of Android applications into the Android environment that is present on your ChromeOS device via the "adb" command. You do not need to change this setting if you intend to use a psychical Android Phone or an emulator to test your applications.

Port Forwarding

Software developers often need to expose ports to the network if they wish to test their code directly on their {FORMFACTOR} before deploying it to a remote server. This is especially true with web developers who may want to expose a web server to their network. In addition to web servers, you can also expose ports used by logging applications or other hardware/software that communicates with devices over a network.

Exposing a port requires a source port and a destination port, as well as the connection-oriented protocol (TCP or UDP). Generally speaking, you will use TCP unless you have a specific use case for UDP.

Your source port is the port number on your local machine that you wish to expose to the network. You will need to use a source port greater than 1024 such as 8080 as ports below 1024 are reserved for the root user.

As an example, if you install the Apache Web Server in your Linux Environment, it will listen on port 80 by default within the container. If you wish to expose this to another machine on your local network on port 8080, you would set port 80 as the destination port and 8080 as the source port.

Disk Size

When you initially enabled Linux support on your device, you were prompted to allocate space for the virtual disk that is assigned to the Linux environment. You can increase or decrease this value as your needs change via the Disk Size option. This will take several minutes depending on the speed of your device, and this process will shut down your Linux environment while the changes are applied. This disk resize will only impact the Termina virtual machine at this time, but will apply to all containers within Termina as they share the same storage pool.

Important - While this process is generally considered reliable, it is strongly recommended that you create a backup of your Linux environment before resizing your disk. If you are shrinking your disk, you should ensure that it is not being resized to a value lower than the amount of space that you are currently using.

Allow Linux to access your microphone

For security reasons, Linux applications are prohibited from accessing the microphone on your device. It is common for Android and Web Applications to request microphone permissions when needed. However, this security model does not extend into Linux, so you will need to manually enable microphone access if you have an application that requires it. This change would globally impact all Linux applications on your device.

Remove Linux development environment

Linux's application support is a powerful tool for those who wish to take advantage of it. However, it does consume a lot of space on your device. You can remove Linux support via this option. You should create a backup of your Linux installation if you wish to resume using Linux.

One additional reason for wanting to remove your Linux installation is if you perform a change to the environment that renders it unstable, you can remove and re-enable Linux application support to get a fresh start.