Chrome OS Crostini Container Update : cros-garcon

As I have mentioned on this blog in the past, the build of debian that is used for the default “penguin” container is very vanilla aside from a few extra packaged used to bridge some of the functionality with ChromeOS. These extra packages are not always updated via the primary Chrome OS update utility and thus must be manually upgraded via the command line. Google has released a upgrade for one of the packages – cros-garcon. Fortunately upgrading this package is very easy.

Cros-garcon is a very important utility as it provides the primary bridge between the container and Chrome OS. One of the most common examples is when an application inside of your Linux container wants to launch a web browser, cros-garcon launches the Chrome web browser on Chrome OS rather then requiring you to install a web browser inside of the container – thus saving you space and overhead.

In order to upgrade, you need to launch your favorite terminal application and run the following commands.

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

You will need to confirm that you want to complete the upgrade after running the final command. The entire process should take less than 20 seconds if this is the only package that needs to be upgraded on your machine. The upgrade command will pull down additional package updates if needed.