(honestly, I’m not even a little bit sure)
We’re doing a getaway night at the Havana in San Antonio on account of it being one of our favorite places to stay, fairly close to home, and it vibes hard enough on its own that we don’t have to go out and be among people so we can just stay in our room. That’s one of our preferred ways to vacation, so it makes sense for us.
Anyway, Nicole is fast asleep because “super chill” is a big part of those aforementioned vibes. I’m not quite ready to call it a night so I decided to install Firefox on my Chromebook.It was one of those “Huh, I wonder if this is possible?” things and, once I saw that it was, I wanted to give it a shot.
It was not, as you may have guessed, as simple as “download an app and install it.” It was a reasonably involved process (at least to the non-Linux user) involving:
- Turn on the developer beta Linux mode.
- Install Linux on a virtual machine.
- Install an installer.
- Install Firefox
Once these steps were complete, I could run Firefox on a Chromebook inside a Linux virtual machine. The process took about 20 minutes. It isn’t the greatest experience, but it does work. It might be a better experience if my Chromebook weren’t 6 years old, but you work with what you’ve got, eh? It does what I need it to do, so that’s good enough for now.
That raises the question: What do I need it to do? Good question! The easy answer is “prove that it can be done” which was something I’d been wondering about for a while. It’s also useful, from a strictly hypothetical standpoint, for maintaining multiple identities should I ever decide to do such a thing.
Is it worth it? Probably not. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and I’m not really doing anything I couldn’t do with multiple Chrome logons and a decent password manager (btw, taking Keeper for a spin after LastPass completely botched their response to their latest breach) couldn’t do and probably do better. There’s a non-zero chance I’ve just done something awful to the limited storage this little fella has.
It was fun, though. On the off chance I ever actually need to do something like this, I know it can be done and, assuming I don’t remember the exact step, I know how to find them. There’s value in that, I suppose.
-RK