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.
Table Of Contents
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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:
