Installs the nano text editor on Chrome OS

installnano.sh

#!/bin/sh
sudo echo -n
sudo mkdir /tmp/nano
cd /tmp/nano
sudo wget http://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/v48/nano.tar.gz
sudo tar -zxvf nano.tar.gz
sudo mv ./nano /usr/bin
sudo rm -rf /tmp/nano

Updated the address for downloading the nano tar as Google have archived it.

hey are you still acitve? got mad trouble with this. I LS /usr/bin, nano is in there
it's green, so executable.

if I try to run nano or /usr/bin/nano it just says not found. whats going on?? T_T

If people managed to get this working in 2020 congrats!

If not I am fairly certain the error @GizmoTheGreen is getting is because the actual binary is incompatible.

You could just use crew package manager for chromeos.

But I chose to do it more manually. I got this working by installing a chroot and then sudo-apt get'ing installing nano on said chroot. Then i ran the comand ldd `which nano` which spits out a list of libraries used. I then copied all these library files to my chromeos's /usr/lib64 folder, although I had to copy libtinfo.so.5 to /lib64 directly. Then it all works great! :) you should also be able to do this without a chroot if you have another machine, I got it working with binaries from my pi.

Oh and obviously after you copy over the libraries copy over the nano binary too which for me was /sbin/nano.

Cool thing about this approach is it has worked for all binaries I want, so I dont have to install crew / beta linux for most all its goodies :)

try this
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ARngbP58h3xqpC4SY3XJY2Zwi4sAcw5P/view?usp=drivesdk

have writable system
sudo cp libncursesw.so.5 /lib64
sudo shown root:root /lib64/libncursesw.so.5
sudo chmod 644 /lib64/libncursesw.so.5

do the same with libtinfo.5.so

sudo cp nano /bin
sudo chnod 777 /bin/nano

works on my CB great amd64 not sure if that will be a problem

try this
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ARngbP58h3xqpC4SY3XJY2Zwi4sAcw5P/view?usp=drivesdk

have writable system
sudo cp libncursesw.so.5 /lib64
sudo shown root:root /lib64/libncursesw.so.5
sudo chmod 644 /lib64/libncursesw.so.5

do the same with libtinfo.5.so

sudo cp nano /bin
sudo chnod 777 /bin/nano

works on my CB great amd64 not sure if that will be a problem

You don't need to have a writable system if you place these files in /usr/local/lib64/ and /usr/local/bin/ instead of /lib64/ and /bin/.

1. Anyone tried compiling a fat static binary, that is with all the libraries in the single self-contained binary nano executable file?
2. I don't want to use root/developer mode yet, so I just copied the crew nano binary to my Downloads folder, but get terminal error I run it in termina

crosh> vsh termina
(termina) chronos@localhost ~ $ cd /mnt/shared/MyFiles/Downloads/
(termina) chronos@localhost /mnt/shared/MyFiles/Downloads $ ./nano-crew
Error opening terminal: xterm-256color.
(termina) chronos@localhost /mnt/shared/MyFiles/Downloads $ TERM=vt100 ./nano-crew 
Error opening terminal: vt100.
### The /etc/terminfo tree is well populated and looks ok to me...
(termina) $ ls /etc/terminfo/
a  d  l  r  s  v  x

I am guessing that error has something to do with ncurses support? Even if I fixed that error, I am guessing it would complain about missing so lib files, which is why I'm looking for statically-compiled binaries for nano and other useful utils like maybe busybox? ( Note top works at termina prompt... does top use ncurses?