PSA: Installing developer and test packages onto a Chrome OS device

[Chris Sosa]

Hey everyone,

As promised, dev-install
(https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/how-tos-and-troubleshooting/install-software-on-base-images?pli=1)
is back working on R26+ (dev-channel and beyond). Vapier and I have
fixed all the major bugs and added integration tests for dev_install
and gmerge to our automated builds to keep any major problems from
re-occurring.

What is dev-install?

Basically dev-install is a way to easily install Chromium OS developer
packages i.e. in chromeos-base/chormeos-dev onto a Chrome OS image
running in dev-mode. It is pre-packaged with every release of Chrome
OS and is a one line script that restores these packages. Given it
also installs gmerge which allows you to set a devserver / board, it
also allows you to easily install any portage package you can build in
your chroot.

Dev-install is meant to easily get developer packages onto Chrome OS,
not to necessarily be a generic solution to making Chrome OS devices
more developer friendly. You may find that Crouton better suits that
need (https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton).

Note, dev-install does not modify the rootfs. This means auto-updates
etc still happen. This also means the image isn't truly a developer or
test image as there are some rootfs modifications done for those
images (ssh passwords and the like) that is not done by dev-install.

-Sosa

[Grant Bowman]

For those frustrated trying to run sudo dev_install try this:

crosh> shell 
sudo su - 
dev_install --reinstall 

Many thanks to Chris Sosa posting this March 5th.

Grant Bowman