On an older laptop, I use chromeOS Flex. Easy to install and for simple web browsing, it’s a perfect solution without any license requirement. But yeah… I also wanted to use PowerShell on that. This blog post will show you how to install and use PowerShell on chromeOS Flex.

Preparation

• Open Settings
• Expand Advanced and select Developers
• Select Turn on
• Select Next
• Enter a User Name and choose a Disk Size (10Gb was the recommended size in my case)
• Select Install, this will take a few minutes, and the Linux Terminal will appear.

Installing PowerShell

Now that you have Linux shell access, you can install PowerShell by following these steps:

• Go to https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell and download the Debian 11 stable .deb file to your Downloads folder
• Open the Downloads folder and open the downloaded .deb file
• Select Install

Running PowerShell

Now that you installed PowerShell, you can run it from the Terminal using pwsh

harmveenstra@penguin:~$ pwsh 
PowerShell 7.2.7
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.

https://aka.ms/powershell
Type 'help' to get help.

PS /home/harmveenstra>

Installing Visual Studio Code

Having PowerShell available is excellent, but even better is to have VSCode available too 🙂 You can install that by following these steps:

• Open a browser and go to https://code.visualstudio.com/download
• Select the 64-Bit .deb file and save it to your Downloads folder
• Open the .deb
• Select Install

• After installation, you can start it from the menu by searching for Visual Studio Code or from your taskbar if it was pinned automatically.

• Follow the Get Started wizard and create a new .ps1 file. This will prompt the installation question for the PowerShell extension. Select Install to add it to Visual Studio Code:

• Skip the Install PowerShell 7 question because we already did that 🙂

And you can start writing code on your chromeOS Flex machine: