Recover from Dev Mode

So there I was in Dev Mode (esc + refresh + power) happily using Crouton. Google made a Debian VMcontainer available (Crostini) and I went for it. At a later restart I neglected to stay in Dev Mode and data was wiped.

This is a journal of the recovery. Everything will be done in Crostini (Debian 11.5 at writing.)

Items to Recover

Vim
LMTX
R
rclone
markdown

Basics

After activating the linux container in chromeos, finding the version of linux is done by:

$ cat /etc/os-release

or

$ hostnamectl

It seems a good idea to me to update and upgrade the distro right away:

$ sudo apt update

and

$ sudo apt upgrade

At this point one can install other packages as needed. I add gdebi installer right away. I will list some other packages/files as we go along.

$ sudo apt install gdebi-core

Note that one can paste into the terminal by alt-click or right-click or equivalent.

File System

Make Downloads, Google Drive, and SD Card available to linux by right clicking (or alt-click) in file manager. They are mounted in /mnt/chromeos/. Google Drive is the top-level entry, but one must go to MyDrive within it. Similarly MyFiles is the top-level with Downloads inside. One way to make these readily available is to make symlinks:

$ ln -s /mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads downloads

and so on for the others.

rclone

There is a Dropbox app for Chrome OS but I prefer to have Dropbox available like the files above.

$ sudo apt install rclone

See rclone.org for config instructions. put detailed explanation here Note that once mounted, the terminal screen kind of hangs without giving a new promt and one starts work in another window. It seems okay to close the hung window.

vim

My vimrc and vim plugins files are backed up and easily re-established. The vim included (8.2) does not have clipboard enabled, but I have found that copy and right click to paste works just fine.

R and RStudio

This is the most problematic because it is a moving target with releases and options. I will report a simple path, a more proper path, and some links of inspiration and credits.

Simple Path

At the time of writing the Crostini Debian is 11.5 and R 4.0.4 is in the repository.

$ sudo apt install r-base r-base-dev

Next go to RStudio and download the latest version for Ubuntu/Debian. (like rstudio-2022.07.2-576-amd64.deb) Click on the downloaded file in the Chrome OS file viewer and Install with Linux. I had a problem at first run which was fixed with:

$ sudo apt install libnss3

So often there is some dependency missing. Thanks to Wen for this solution.

Markdown

Markdown Preview Plus was in Extensions but did not take effect right off. I added Markdown Viewer and toggled back-and-forth. MPP finally kicked in and life is good. To adjust font size include the html tag:

<font size = 4> </font> 

Frankly, editing files in the Blot folder and previewing that way seems ok to me. I need to pull the Blot CSS over for use in Markdown Preview Plus. I don’t need syntax highlighting. MPP is looking to be a bit weak.

For yet unknown reason Chrome does NOT open .md files but again, so what if they are .txt files?

ConTeXt

LMTX is the recent version of ConTeXt that is my TeX place. It is pretty a straightforward install. My texmf-local files and modules have to be copied in. Lately to keep it simple I am using only the fonts included in lmtx. I have not needed any of the modules lately.

Remember to register texmf-local, modules, fonts, etc.

$ context --generate