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BACKGROUND

I received a Chromebook Pixel from Google I/O and although the screen is absolutely beautiful, Chrome OS itself is somewhat limited.  I've set up Crouton from the excellent instructions located here: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton.  I could have run Ubuntu in  chroot but it doesn't quite look or feel the same.  I also wanted to keep my system light so I've opted only for crouton's command line tools instead of starting the window manager.  Without a window manager, it's difficult to get an IDE working and after some research, I settled on Cloud9 IDE.  Below is my experience setting it up.

REQUIREMENTS

First, run the following to install the necessary Ubuntu packages:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential g++ curl libssl-dev apache2-utils git libxml2-dev

Next, it's very important to install the correct node version.  I installed from the Ubuntu package manager which doesn't work well.  I also tried the latest version which also doesn't work well and also a different version from other tutorials.  I received different errors during the "npm install" step.  The best way to do this is:

curl https://raw.github.com/creationix/nvm/master/install.sh | sh

Logout and then log back in and execute the following:

nvm install 0.8.8
nvm alias default 0.8.8

At this point, you should have satisfied Cloud9's requirements.

INSTALLATION

Installation is now pretty straight-forward.  You can follow the directions on their Github (https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9/) page or run the following:

git clone https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9.git
cd cloud9
npm install

The above install steps create a cloud9 directory with a bin/cloud9.sh script that can be used to start Cloud9:

bin/cloud9.sh

Optionally, you may specify the directory you'd like to edit:

bin/cloud9.sh -w ~/git/myproject

Cloud9 will be started as a web server on port -p 3131, you can access it by pointing your browser to:http://localhost:3131

Enjoy your new web IDE!


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