Sunday, 23 November 2014

Chrome OS is now running under a 64 bit CPU

While following the Node and NPM on Chromebook (Chrome OS) blog on how to set up Node, I had the same problem as some of the users that posted a comment. I was getting an cannot execute binary file error when trying to run the downloaded binary files from Archlinux.

This can be confirmed by running uname -m (one of the ways to check if linux OS is 32 bit or 64 Bit) which should return x86_64.

This means that the links provided on that link should be changed from:

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/xz/
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/nodejs/

to 


You can find other packages to install at https://www.archlinux.org/packages/

Btw, note that on the version of Chromium that ships with the DELL ChromeBook 11 (which is what I have) the xz package doesn't need to be installed (it is already part of the distribution). In fact that was a reason I had to restore/rebuild the CromeBook from a recovery USB, since I had copied the i686 xz files into /usr/bin which overwrote the original x86_64 ones, and prevented me from being able to extract any more .xz files :)

Another problem that you will need to solve is to run the files from outside the /usr/bin folder since it only has 200Mb free (which get 100% used if you install node + git). See my post Running git, node, python,make and levelgraph on Chrome OS (inside a ChromeBook) for more details.

As you can see on that post think is better to use Crouton for this kind of activities (like running  node, git, python, etc...) on a Chrome OS, since not only it is less intrusive (and doesn't change the base OS), it uses the 10GB free space that exists on a clean Chrome OS install