<p>But that's it pretty much. While the rest of this page gives some hints for doing some other stuff, with great difficulty, it's not really worth it. A Chromebook fundamentally <em>is</em> a an expo <ahref="basiclaptop.html">basic laptop</a>.
<p>Chromebooks do not have any way of locally running Tunnel, Survex or Therion. So you can't create a centre-line plot or trave over a centre-line plot to create a cave survey.
<p>To a very, very limited extent you can get around this for survex by running Survex/Cavern <ahref="/survexfile/caves-1623/264/watertorture.svx">on the expo server</a>, where you can type in and edit survex files. This will serve to check for syntax errors. But it won't give you a .3d file you can visually spin around in 3D and you can't print out a centre-line plot.
<p>OK, so you can't do any of the cave survey jobs with tunnel or therion, but there are some cave data management jobs you <em>might</em> want to do, such as
<ul>
<li>restart the server or
<li>rename a whole load of files when a cave gets a kataster number, e.g. when Balkonhöhle got renamed from 2002-05 to 1623-264. Or,
<li>with ssh, you would even be able to log in to the server and reset all the data imports to troggle (nerds only).
<p>The oldest Chromebooks can't run Android apps or Chrome Browser Extensions. They can't install or run the FTP capability in the Chromebook Files App either. Anything after 2019 should run Crostini (see below) and the most recent can run <ahref="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-how-to-use-secure-shell-from-your-chromebook/">ssh Chromebook Apps</a>.
<p>You may not need to install any software to get <var>scp</var> or <var>ssh</var> running either: these are pre-installed on every Chromebook as part of ChromeOs, but getting to them is not so easy.
<p>Read <ahref="https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en">Linux on your Chromebook</a>.
<p>Either enable <ahref="https://chromeos.dev/en/linux">Crostini</a> or, on a pre-2019 Chromebook, do this:
<ul>
<li>Boot into <ahref="https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/chrome-os-developer-mode?r=US&IR=T">Developer Mode</a> (which deletes all user data, so do this when you buy the thing, not later).
<li>Visit the special <ahref="https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/developer_mode.md">[crosh] </a> web page in the Chrome browser by pressing Ctrl-Alt-T
<li>type <var>shell</var> which then puts you into a bash session
<li> Now you can access ssh, ssh-keygen, sftp and scp (but not rsync) from the command line.
<li>NB The default user is 'chronos' and they keys will be generated in <var>/home/chronos/user/.ssh/</var> so generate them using the command <var>ssh-keygen -C myrealname@mychromebook</var> and get the public key copied ot the expo server as it instructs in <ahref="https://expo.survex.com/handbook/computing/keyexchange.html">Key Pair setup</a>.
<p>Alternatively you can run the Chrome extension <ahref="https://mosh.org/">'mosh'</a>, which achieves the same thing as ssh, but this will stop working at the end of 2022 unless someone re-writes it.
<ahref="https://uk.pcmag.com/linux/135719/how-to-install-linux-on-your-chromebook">instead</a> (realistically only for Intel Chromebooks - old ARM Chromebooks are paperweights, sadly).
