Arch Linux chroot for Chrome OS

Switch your device to developer mode and run the following:

curl https://raw.github.com/gsf/archrome/master/install.sh | sudo sh

You should feel free to inspect install.sh before you run it locally, of course. Note that some defaults can be overridden by environment variables.

When the script finishes, you will have a chroot with a minimal base for building a system.

Enter the chroot with the newly-installed archrome script, which wraps the chroot command to handle the mounting of various directories. If a command is passed to archrome, it will be executed in the chroot instead of the usual /bin/bash. For example:

sudo archrome date

Archrome aims to be the minimal environment necessary for further building of the system. Some base packages (shadow, tzdata, etc.) and basic necessities (git, less, vim) will need to be installed once one is in the chroot to do much of anything. Also, users may need to be created, locales and timezones set, etc.

To set up an SSH server, run the following in the chroot:

# pacman -S openssh shadow
# ssh-keygen -A

Start it up with /bin/sshd or from outside the chroot with sudo archrome /bin/sshd.

Arch package signing has been disabled because the generating of the master key takes a significant amount of time during installation. Also, that level of security seems unwarranted for a chroot on a chromebook.

To enable package signing, complete the following steps:

1. Install archlinux-keyring
2. Run pacman-key --init
3. Run pacman-key --populate archlinux
4. Delete or comment out the SigLevel = Never line in /etc/pacman.conf

Remember to unmount things before running rm -rf on a chroot! A grep chroot /etc/mtab or two will help, as will this:

sudo umount /usr/local/chroots/arch/{proc,sys,dev/pts,dev,var/host/media,var/host/shill,var/host/Downloads}