Installing Gnome Software Center on a Chromebook

To install the Gnome Software Center, open up a terminal window, and type the following command:
sudo apt-get install gnome-software gnome-packagekit

When the Terminal asks if you want to continue, press the ‘Y’ key on your keyboard, then ‘Enter’ again. This command installs two packages – the software center, and the tool that allows the software center to communicate with the Debian system.

Once it’s done downloading and installing everything, you should see a ‘Software’ app in the app drawer. Click on it to open the Gnome Software Center. If the Gnome Software Center App is empty or blank, you may have to restart your Chromebook ~10 times to get it to fully load… at least that’s an issue I initially ran into.

Installing Steam on your Chromebook via terminal (Crostini)

From terminal, run the following:

echo 'deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 sudo apt update sudo apt install steam

After steam installs, to run Steam, simply type steam from the terminal.

Install Python 3.7 on Chromebook through Terminal (no dev mode, beta channel, crouton needed)

Step 1 – Prerequisites

Use the following command to install prerequisites for Python before installing it.

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
sudo apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev \
    libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libbz2-dev

Step 2 – Download Python 3.7

Download Python using following command from python official site. You can also download latest version in place of specified below.

cd /usr/src
sudo wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.0/Python-3.7.0.tgz

Now extract the downloaded package.

sudo tar xzf Python-3.7.0.tgz

Step 3 – Compile Python Source

Use below set of commands to compile python source code on your system using altinstall.

cd Python-3.7.0
sudo ./configure --enable-optimizations
sudo make altinstall

make altinstall is used to prevent replacing the default python binary file /usr/bin/python.

Step 4 – Check Python Version

Check the latest version installed of python using below command

python3.7 -V

Python-3.7.0