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depthboot-builder
Discontinued A CLI script to create bootable linux images for Chromebooks (by eupnea-project)
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devpod
Codespaces but open-source, client-only and unopinionated: Works with any IDE and lets you use any cloud, kubernetes or just localhost docker.
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Not exactly. There are some ways to install GNU/Linux distros on Chromebooks, the Eupnea project's Depthboot script[1], for example, lets users build/run a distro by extracting the rootfs from an ISO file, and apply Chromebook-specific patches, like using ChromeOS' kernel, using keyd to make patches to support the Chromebook keyboard's action keys, and much others.
(Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer of the Eupnea project.)
[1]: https://github.com/eupnea-linux-backup/depthboot-builder
The team has both made a ton of effort switching off their proprietary Skia based rendering tech and adopting standard Wayland, and has put forward huge effort to making running incredibly well integrated real Linux containers just work.
The headline is true. ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment. But it obfuscates the details. It's a damned by omission statement. It has some really good sauce to help you not notice often, but it's not at all a Linux desktop environment one can regularly use. You can do a lot of Linux desktop-y things but only through well crafted special unique wrapped processes that mostly but not fully help mock & emulate a regular Linux desktop. Even though it now runs Wayland, the apps you want to run will have atypical intermediates up the wazoo.
And no one else uses any of this tech. ChromiumOs has so much interesting container tech, does such an interesting job making containers think they have a regular Linux / FreeDesktop environment. It's far far far far deeper virtualization than for example https://github.com/containers/toolbox . But you know what? Google has made zero effort to get these pieces adopted elsewhere. It's open source but not intended for use outside Chromium/ChromeOS. I respect & think ChromeOS is a quite viable Linux, and it's so much closer to the metal & more interesting, amazing tech, but my gods Microsoft has gone 300x further to establish wsl2 as a sustainable community effort folks could use & target, in a way that ChromiumOS has done nothing about.
It's sad how Google has transformed from a company that appreciated & worked with ecosystems, that drove things collectively forward, into an individual player that does their own things & delivers from on high. ChromiumOS is such an incredible effort, but it's so internernally drive & focused, and it's hard to believe in such a wildcat effort, even though it's so so good. It keeps coming into better alignment with Linux Desktop actual, but via shims and emulations that no one else cares about or which seems marketed elsewhere. And that inward focus makes the whole effort both so exceptional & promising, but suspect. Such a different nearby but alternative & separately governed universe. ChromiumOS/ChromeOS do excellent at faking being a Linux desktop, and wonderfully have increasingly drawn more strength from that universe, but are still wholly their own very distinct very separate very controller other space. In many ways that's great, secure, good, and miraculously transparently done. But it's still hard to really trust, being such a weird alien impostor, faking so much for end user apps, and there's tension in believing ChromeOS will keep straddling the rift in pro-user manifestations forever.
Rumor has it, it may eventually replace Linux as the underlying OS to Android/ART. By now I'm thinking G's leadership is realizing the epic undertaking it would mean to bring Fuchsia to maturity... and I give Fuchsia a 50/50 chance of ending up in the vast Google graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/) in the next 5 years.
I'm curious why they couldn't poach one of the L4 microkernels to build Fuchsia on, specifically SEL4 which is used in Genode/SculptOS, same as they did with Linux and Android. It would've given them a strong base to build on, saved time/$$$....
For students, unless there are allocated server resources with network access, it SHOULD/MUST scale down to one local offline ARM64 node (because school districts haven't afforded containers on a managed k8s cloud for students at scale fwiu, though universities do with e.g. JupyterHub and BinderHub [4] and Colab).
For Chromebook sysadmins, Instructors, and Students learning about how {Linux*, ChromiumOS, Android, Git, Bash, ZSH, Python, and e.g. PyData Tools supported by NumFOCUS} are developed, for example;
When you git commit to a git branch, and then `git push` that branch to GitHub, and create a Pull Request, GitHub Actions runs the (container,command) tasks defined in the YAML files in the .github/workflows/ directory of the repo; so `git push` to a PR branch runs the CI job and the results are written back as cards in the Pull Request thread on the GitHub Project; saving to the server runs the (container,command) Actions with that revision of the git repo.
Somewhat-equivalent GitOps CI Continuous Integration workflows (without Bazel or Blaze or gtest or gn, or GitHub Enterprise or GitHub Free due to the kids' intererests) that might be supported at least in analogue by Education and Chromebooks: k8s with podman-desktop in a VM, Gitea Actions (nektos/act; like Github Actions), devpod
devpod: https://github.com/loft-sh/devpod :
> Codespaces but open-source, client-only and unopinionated: Works with any IDE and lets you use any cloud, kubernetes or just localhost docker. (with devcontainer.json, like Github Codespaces)
devcontainer.json is supported by a number of tools; e.g. VScode, IntelliJ,: https://containers.dev/supporting
repo2docker has buildpacks (like Heroku and Google AppEngine).
repo2docker buildpacks should probably work with devcontainer.json too?
repo2docker docs > Usage > "REES: Reproducible Execution Environment" describes what all repo2docker will build a container from: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html
jupyterhub/repo2docker builds a Dockerfile (Containerfile) from git repo (or a Figshare/Zenodo DOI) that minimally has at least an /environment.yml and /example.py (and probably also at least a /README.md to start with), and installs a current, updated version of jupyter notebook along with whatever's in e.g. /environment.yml per the REES spec. [1][2][3]
[1] repo2docker/buildpacks/base.py: https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker/blob/main/repo2doc...
[2] "Make base_image configurable" https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker/commit/20b08152578...
[3] repo2docker/buildpacks/conda/environment.py-3.11.yml:
For students, unless there are allocated server resources with network access, it SHOULD/MUST scale down to one local offline ARM64 node (because school districts haven't afforded containers on a managed k8s cloud for students at scale fwiu, though universities do with e.g. JupyterHub and BinderHub [4] and Colab).
For Chromebook sysadmins, Instructors, and Students learning about how {Linux*, ChromiumOS, Android, Git, Bash, ZSH, Python, and e.g. PyData Tools supported by NumFOCUS} are developed, for example;
When you git commit to a git branch, and then `git push` that branch to GitHub, and create a Pull Request, GitHub Actions runs the (container,command) tasks defined in the YAML files in the .github/workflows/ directory of the repo; so `git push` to a PR branch runs the CI job and the results are written back as cards in the Pull Request thread on the GitHub Project; saving to the server runs the (container,command) Actions with that revision of the git repo.
Somewhat-equivalent GitOps CI Continuous Integration workflows (without Bazel or Blaze or gtest or gn, or GitHub Enterprise or GitHub Free due to the kids' intererests) that might be supported at least in analogue by Education and Chromebooks: k8s with podman-desktop in a VM, Gitea Actions (nektos/act; like Github Actions), devpod
devpod: https://github.com/loft-sh/devpod :
> Codespaces but open-source, client-only and unopinionated: Works with any IDE and lets you use any cloud, kubernetes or just localhost docker. (with devcontainer.json, like Github Codespaces)
devcontainer.json is supported by a number of tools; e.g. VScode, IntelliJ,: https://containers.dev/supporting
repo2docker has buildpacks (like Heroku and Google AppEngine).
repo2docker buildpacks should probably work with devcontainer.json too?
repo2docker docs > Usage > "REES: Reproducible Execution Environment" describes what all repo2docker will build a container from: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html
jupyterhub/repo2docker builds a Dockerfile (Containerfile) from git repo (or a Figshare/Zenodo DOI) that minimally has at least an /environment.yml and /example.py (and probably also at least a /README.md to start with), and installs a current, updated version of jupyter notebook along with whatever's in e.g. /environment.yml per the REES spec. [1][2][3]
[1] repo2docker/buildpacks/base.py: https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker/blob/main/repo2doc...
[2] "Make base_image configurable" https://github.com/jupyterhub/repo2docker/commit/20b08152578...
[3] repo2docker/buildpacks/conda/environment.py-3.11.yml:
https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/code-scanning/intro...
GitHub Project Templates are designed to be forked; e.g. like an assignment handout to be filled out (that already has an /.github/workflows/actions.yml and README.md headings). Cookiecutter is another way to create a project/assignment/handout/directory/git_repo skeleton; with jinja2 templates to generate file names like `/{{name}}/README.md` and file contents like {% if name %}
Hello World, {{name}}{% endif %} . jinja2 is a useful skill also for ansible [collections of roles of] playbooks of tasks.
chromebook-ansible installs a number of apps by default (including docker and vscode (instead of podman and vscodium or similar)), but because there are variables in the playbook, you can change which parts of the playbook runs by specifying different parameters with ansible inventory: https://github.com/seangreathouse/chromebook-ansible#include... https://github.com/seangreathouse/chromebook-ansible/blob/c8...
It would be helpful to be able to provision [Android and Chromebook] devices with [Ansible] like it is possible with Mac, Windows, and Linux devices (without a domain controller; decentralizedly and for bootstrapping). It appears that there happens to be no way to `adb install play-store://url` with Ansible, but there is news about Ansible support for Enterprise Chromebooks.
There are [vscode] IDE mentions in the chromebook git repos IIRC. The [vscode] [docker/podman extension] could work with aforementioned functionality to limit which containers can be pulled or are running at a given time.
USE CASE (for a "STEM workstations for learning" spec): Create a minimal git repo project from a project template with cookiecutter-pypackage or similar.
A minimal project [template] would have:
/README.md # h1, badges, {{schema:description}}, #install, #usage, #license, #citation