For those of us that hang around in the Beta, Dev and Canary Channels of Chrome OS on a regular basis, we’re pretty accustomed to bugs and issues. It is part of the territory when you live on the bleeding edge of technology, and as you climb the ladder of Chrome releases, the OS becomes more and more unstable.
Today’s bug report is a pretty big one, however, and we wanted to make sure that everyone that lives in the Dev Channel on a regular basis is aware that this particular issue in the latest update that rolled out yesterday looks to be affecting everyone.
So, what is happening, exactly? From what we can tell so far, the Linux container will install just fine, but as soon as anything is run or installed, the container will not ever come back online. No restarts will help, unfortunately, and the only way to get Linux containers to respond again is to fully remove them and re-install.
The problem with this is the exact issue will rear its head again after install, so there’s no way to work around the problem at this point. Additionally, since the container won’t mount, if you try to access your files in the Files app, you’ll also encounter an error.
We were up and running Linux on 3 different devices (an i7 HP Chromebox, Pixelbook, and Lenovo C630) and testing some very, very interesting GPU enhancements when the latest update came through on the Lenovo and HP. After taking the update on those machines, my Linux containers became unusable and I quickly tested things on the Pixelbook to make sure we were still up and running. Things were perfect there until taking the Version 76.0.3807.0 update and then it joined the rest in being unusable for Linux apps.
It is likely that Google will push out a fix for this much quicker than a usual channel update, but we’ll simply have to wait and see at this point. With more and more users and developers adopting Linux apps on Chromebooks, this is a much bigger issue than it was just a few months ago. Here’s hoping Google responds swiftly. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
