How to access your Obsidian notes on Chrome OS
Obsidian is a markdown-based notebook and personal knowledge base application for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It operates with Markdown files and has tons of great community plugins. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can install the Obsidian app on your Chromebook.
How to enable Linux on your Chromebook
Obsidian is a Linux application, and to use it on a Chromebook, you’ll need to enable Linux support on your device. To enable Linux support on Chrome OS, start by clicking on the clock in the Chrome OS dash, then the gear icon to load up the settings.
Inside of the Settings area, look for the “Advanced” section, and click on the drop-down arrow next to it. When you select this arrow, you’ll see more advanced options available in the Settings area, including “Developers.” Click on “Developers,” followed by “Linux development environment.”
Click on the “Turn on” button. Selecting this button will download a Debian Linux container to your system. It’ll also download a terminal application for Chrome OS. Once the terminal app is done downloading, it’ll launch on your Chromebook. Find “Penguin,” and click on it with the mouse. Selecting “Penguin” will load up the Linux command line interface.
Inside of the Linux command line interface, use the apt update command to update the container’s software sources.
sudo apt update
With the software sources up to date, you must install the available patches for the container to keep it in working order. You can do this with the apt upgrade command.
sudo apt upgrade
After updating the container and installing patches, you’ll be able to use it to install the Obsidian notes app on your Chromebook.
How to install Obsidian on Chrome OS
To install Obsidian on your Chromebook, you’ll first need to launch the Chrome OS terminal. Once you’ve launched it, click on “Penguin,” to access the terminal command-line interface. Now that you’ve got command-line access, you can use the wget command to download the latest Obsidian DEB package to your computer.
wget https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/download/v1.3.5/obsidian_1.3.5_amd64.deb
Once the file is done downloading to your Chromebook, you can use the apt command to install the package onto your computer. The apt command is preferable to the dpkg command, as the apt command will collect and take care of any package requirements automatically.
sudo apt install ./obsidian_1.3.5_amd64.deb
How to install the Obsidian AppImage
If you’re not interested in installing the DEB package to your Chrome OS Linux developer environment, you can also download and launch the official Obsidian AppImage. This file is a self-contained executable and can be run directly from the terminal.
Note: AppImages aren’t officially supported on Chrome OS, so you may run into issues.
To start, download the latest Obsidian AppImage to your computer using the wget command. This command will place it directly in the Chrome OS Linux container.
wget https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/download/v1.3.5/Obsidian-1.3.5.AppImage
Once you’ve downloaded the Obsidian AppImage to the Linux container on your Chromebook, you need to update the permissions for the file so that it is executable. Do that with the chmod command.
chmod +x Obsidian-1.3.5.AppImage
With the permissions updated, you’ll be able to run the Obsidian AppImage directly using the following command in a terminal.
./Obsidian-1.3.5.AppImage
How to install the Obsidian Flatpak package
Another way to get Obsidian working on your Chromebook is via a Flatpak. To start, you’ll need to enable the Flatpak runtime on your Chrome OS system. To do that, open up the Chrome OS terminal app, and select “Penguin.” After choosing “Penguin,” use the apt install command to install the “flatpak” package. This package handles the Flatpak runtime on Linux.
sudo apt install flatpak
When the Flatpak package is installed, the setup process isn’t over. You also need to add the Flathub app store. This app store handles all the Flatpak packages, including Obsidian. If you do not add it, you will not be able to install the Obsidian editor on your Chromebook. To set up the Flatpak app store on your Chromebook, use the flatpak remote-add command below.
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Once the Flathub app store is installed on your system, you’ll be able to easily set up the Obsidian app on your Chromebook using the command below.
flatpak install flathub md.obsidian.Obsidian
