3

I'm using crouton which enables me to run 14.04 on my Chromebook. I opted to not install a desktop to save disk space so used the cli-extra target when installing:

sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -r trusty -t cli-extra -n cli

I can now run sudo enter-chroot from my Chrome OS shell.

My question

Is it possible to launch graphical programs such as gedit? When I use LXDE on another system, I can run gksudo gedit to launch the program but this command isn't recognised in this case. Also, running sudo gedit results in the message "Cannot open display:".

henrywright
  • 396

2 Answers2

2

The Xorg server is what takes care of drawing a graphical environment. When Xorg is launched, it also launches an application with a GUI. When this application exits, so does Xorg (if I recall correctly). In Ubuntu, this application is the Unity desktop environment.

You should be able to install a barebones Xorg server, and use the command line (I think xinit gedit should do it) to make it launch the application you want. Alternatively, you can install a lightweight window manager like Openbox. These are typically less user-friendly than full-blown desktop environments like Gnome, Unity and KDE Plasma, but they are also a lot smaller and faster.

RobinJ
  • 9,020
0

You can run them on a virtual server:

Install:

xorg-server-xvfb

Then run:

xvfb-run [command]
Alberto Salvia Novella
  • 772