Friday, May 9, 2014

Enable flash,PDF and mp3 plugin for 64-bit Chromium OS ArnoldTheBats build

Yesterday I downloaded and installed the latest 64-bit Chromium OS ArnoldTheBats daily buildCamd64OS-20140508010101.img.7zto an old laptop MSI X340. It booted into Chromium OS successfully and Wi-Fi worked well (push Fn-F8 to turn on Wi-Fi if the Wi-Fi LED is not lit). However, its web browser lacks the plugin of flash, mp3 player or PDF viewer that Chrome OS has. I had to do the following to get them to work:
  1. Login as a normal Chromium user (not a guest or a supervised one)
  2. Push Ctrl-Alt-F2 to open the developer console, where it shows "localhost login:"
  3. Enter "chronos" as the login user, "password" as the password if prompted
  4. Run the following command to become the root user
    sudo su
  5. Run the following command script as root user to enable the 64-bit flash and PDF plugin
    curl -L http://goo.gl/MuVta5 | bash
    After it downloads a file that is about 10 MB, it will install the 64-bit flash, mp3 player and PDF viewer plugins and restart the Chromium OS. The following functions were verified to be working after logging into Chromium:
  • Flash
  • PDF
  • mp3/mp4