Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Installing the Nano text editor

I've discovered that the stock cr-48 setup can use binary packages from Arch Linux.
This is how to install the Nano editor from arch. I'll provide two different methods, depending on if you want to pull the package from the repository yourself, or use my repackaged binary.

**You need to follow the instructions in the Notes post first, to make the partitions writeable

* Installing from an Arch repo.
You'll need to download the package to a linux machine of your choosing. You can find the package at: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/nano/

The package is compressed as a .tar.xz, which eluded me for the longest time.
To extract the package use XZ Utils on Linux
The syntax is: xz -d filename

Once you have decompressed the file from it's .xz container, you will be left with a .tar file, which the cr-48 has tools to open.

Now we need to get the file to the CR-48.
If you have a ssh server on your linux box, we can use sftp to retrieve the file
sftp user@host If you don't have an ssh server, you can upload the file to some public webspace, and wget the file from the cr-48

Once the file is on your cr-48, you can tar -xvf it, and copy the nano exec from the bin directory into /usr/bin (which is in the path) and nano should run flawlessly.



** If you don't want to go through all that work, open up a shell on the cr-48, and wget http://www.calliesfarm.com/chromeos/nano.tar.gz then, tar -zxvf nano.tar.gz and move the nano exec to /usr/bin

3 comments:

  1. Keeps telling me read-only file system when I try to cp the nano exec to /usr/bin/...?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Same problem here. Perhaps an update to ChromeOS, but / is now mounted read-only, and anything writeable has the noexec option.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Worked great, thanks for posting the steps. Why not install xz first so that you don't have to depend on another m/c to un-xz? Get the xz package from http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/xz/, and gunzip it (yes, it is compressed with gzip, just like you would expect) and "rsync -av" everything from bin and lib directories to /usr/local.

    To the previous posters, you didn't read the entire post, you need to follow additional steps to make the filesystem read-write.

    ReplyDelete