I made a post yesterday that covered the steps required to install Ubuntu on an ASUS C200 Chromebook. One thing I noticed was that, while you are running Ubuntu, it ties up your terminal window and makes it unavailable for doing other tasks.

According to some information that I found here, you should be able to accomplish this via a parameter supplied to the startxfce4 command. For example:

startxfce4 -b

That didn’t seem to work for me. The command still ran in the foreground. I found that just using the standard Unix/Linux way worked fine:

startxfce4 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Note: You cannot prefix this with nohup and close out the terminal completely. Doing so will exit the chroot environment and terminate Ubuntu. But at least you know have access to the command-line in that terminal and you don’t have to look at a bunch of debug messages.

So far this Chromebook experiment is going very well. Lot’s of fun!