Linux Developer Mode Disabled?

[Elouan Grimm]

I have a 3 or 4 year old Lenovo 500e Chromebook. Just yesterday, I logged onto my Linux Terminal and used it fine. But my computer restarted, and all of a sudden, I am getting a message says "Linux is not supported on your Chromebook. " and when I open the Terminal app it has a pop-up that says "This VM has been disabled by your Administrator".

I would like to make it clear:

1. My device has run out of software updates a while ago, and I have not turned on extended updates.

2. This is a personal Chromebook, and was never enrolled in an Enterprise or EDU mode.

3. IT WAS WORKING YESTERDAY!!!!

4. My Chromebook is in the list of supported devices for Linux.

5. I have tons of important files and stuff on there.

6. I DID very recently turn on a bunch of Chrome Flags, but they were mostly UI changes and not sure if it's relevant.

Please help!

Thanks so much!

[Joel Hockey]

Could you send a feedback report (Alt+Shift+I).  Maybe include your email address in the description or something else that I can search on - let me know.

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[Mike Frysinger]

after you do that, i would reboot.  maybe turning it off & on again would fix things.

-mike

[Elouan Grimm]

I have sent the feedback with the email being "elouan...@gmail.com", and I have rebooted repeatedly to no avail.

Should I try deleting all of my Chrome Flags? A full list of my installed ones is here: Google sheets

Thanks for your help!

[Joel Hockey]

If you open Settings > About, do you see if your device is being managed such as my device which is managed by google.com?

Do you have any value in chrome://policy for VirtualMachinesAllowed?

Does it work if you open a regular tab and enter address: chrome-untrusted://terminal/

[Joel Hockey]

After you try loading chrome-untrusted://terminal in a regular tab, could you do another feedback report to capture the logs.  It turns out that full email addresses get stripped from reports, so just use your name or mine (or both, e.g. #eloangrimm or #joelhockey).  Or pick any other tag and let me know.

[Joel Hockey]

Usually you know when your device is managed.  If this is your personal device, then I don't expect that it would be managed.  And devices can't just change in and out - you have to wipe them to enrol them for management.

So I'm a bit stumped right now why your terminal is showing that the VM is blocked by policy.

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 6:44 PM Elouan Grimm <eloua...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am not at my computer right now, but I will run those tests when I get back in a couple hours. From my memory, I am pretty sure that my computer is not managed but I'm not sure about the other things. Will make a bug report later! Thanks for the help.

[Elouan Grimm]

I am not at my computer right now, but I will run those tests when I get back in a couple hours. From my memory, I am pretty sure that my computer is not managed but I'm not sure about the other things. Will make a bug report later! Thanks for the help.

[OpenOS Project]

Here is a tool I found a couple months ago, hope it helps . . .

https://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/RecoMod

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[Dmitry Torokhov]

If you open "crosh" shell (ctrl+alt+t) and do "vmc start termina" it will probably give you a more detailed error.

I will note though that the device is out of support window and is staying on 126 release.

[Elouan Grimm]

@openosproject I actually used mercury workshop stuff like that a couple years back in school for my enrolled chromebooks, but since my current computer isn't enrolled, it would probably not help. Thanks though!

[Elouan Grimm]

Oh great news! I have fixed the problem by DISABLING ALL OF MY CHROME FLAGS. I will do some snooping to figure out which one it was, but thanks to everyone who tried to help. My full list of all the flags I enabled can be found here, if anyone can tell what caused the problem. https://l.elouan.xyz/1xVp

Thanks!

On Friday, April 18, 2025 at 2:06:49 PM UTC+2 OpenOS Project wrote:

[Elouan Grimm]

1. `Settings > About`: I did not see that i'm enrolled.

2. my `chrome://policy` is fully empty

3. When I open `chrome-untrusted://terminal/`, it gives me this error: "Launching vmshell failed: Error starting crostini for terminal: 34 (NOT_ALLOWED)"

4. I have made a feedback report with both my name and yours.

[Joel Hockey]

great to hear that you got the linux VM running.

2025-04-18T16:16:12.876811Z ERROR chrome[1856:1856]: [crostini_manager.cc(389)] Crostini UI not allowed for profile (email: 1)
2025-04-18T16:16:12.876957Z ERROR chrome[1856:1856]: [crostini_manager.cc(917)] Failed to restart Crostini with error code: 34, container: (type:0:TERMINA vm:"termina" container:"penguin")

The error message shows that crostini is disabled due to one of the checks in:
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/refs/tags/126.0.6478.120:chrome/browser/ash/crostini/crostini_features.cc;l=180-258;drc=d9d288eb7efcfbebf9afaf9777b39a60a3fcac7d

That code looks for various things including flag 'Crostini', and whether the device has /dev/kvm, and if any policy exists and blocks VMs.

None of the flags you have listed look like they should be causing a problem.  If you do trace the problem to a specific flag, I would love to know.

Crostini requires flag 'Crostini' to be enabled.  This flag is not visible from chrome://flags, but is set internally.  Perhaps it is just the fact that you have so many flags on, you might be hitting some size limit.

[OpenOS Project]

Here are some other resources . . .

https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/gentoo/gentoo/+/refs/heads/master/app-containers/incus/

https://github.com/sebanc/brioche

https://github.com/velzie/crumpet

https://github.com/f-bn/incus-images

https://github.com/antifob/incus-windows

https://github.com/lxc/distrobuilder

https://github.com/lxc/incus-os

https://opsmaru.com/blog/open-sourced-lxd-incus-image-server

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zmDIfJtCKCk&si=vbb8U8AewBKU1gkX

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Na_jKeVWzrc&si=0avd-Vs0eA43mWgR