How to install and use Obsidian on a Chromebook

Who knew Chromebooks were so capable?

All hail Obsidian! No, seriously — unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last several months, you must have heard of Obsidian — the markdown text editor that’s taken the personal productivity world by storm.

This article isn’t going to get into what Obsidian is, or what it does — suffice to say it’s very good indeed. No — this article is going to concentrate on one thing — how to get Obsidian running on a Chromebook.

Let’s get a disclaimer out of the way before we get started — the method detailed below is only going to work on more recent Chromebooks. If you’re using an old Chromebook with a low hardware spec, don’t expect it to have the Linux option available.

Enable “Linux” on your Chromebook

Your mileage here may vary, depending on the age and specification of your Chromebook. Newer Chromebooks (sold in the last four or five years) almost all have the capability of running Linux applications. Just bear in mind that your machine will need a fair amount of spare storage, and enough RAM to run Linux successfully.

1. Visit the Settings page on the Chromebook
2. Scroll down to “Advanced” in the left margin of settings
3. Open the “Developers” section
4. Enable the “Linux Development Environment”

The Chromebook will take a few minutes to download, install and configure Linux. When it’s done, you will find a Terminal application in the app launcher, with the option of using “Penguin” within it.

When you choose “Pengiun”, your Chromebook spins up a secure virtual machine within your Chromebook running your own personal instance of Linux.

Install Obsidian on your Chromebook

Here’s where the magic happens! If you’ve got this far, you have a terminal window on your Chromebook screen, with a cursor blinking away — waiting for you to enter some commands.

Update Linux

When you first configure Linux within the Chromebook, it’s worth checking that all available updates have been applied — run the following command to check for updates:

sudo apt-get update

Next tell Linux to check itself against the available updates, and perform upgrades where needed:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Flatpak

Flatpak is a popular package management tool in Linux that allows software to be distributed and installed in a straightforward manner. Run the following command to install flatpak:

sudo apt install flatpak

Add a repository to Flatpak

When flatpak is first installed, it doesn’t know where software might come from — so add the “flathub” repository by running the following command (it’s all one line):

sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Finally, install Obsidian

Now we have Flatpak and Flathub configured, we can install Obsidian:

sudo flatpak install flathub md.obsidian.Obsidian

When the installer has finished, look in the app launcher of your Chromebook, and you should see the Obsidian icon waiting for you. The first launch will take a few moments.

But how do I save my work?

It’s all well and good running Obsidian on your Chromebook — but how might you take advantage of Google Drive to auto-magically save what you do in Obsidian?

It turns out it’s quite easy:

1. Open the files application in your Chromebook
2. Navigate to Google Drive, and create a folder somewhere that you want Linux applications to have access to.
3. Right click on the folder you create, and “Share with Linux”.

The above functionality will “mount” the folder within the Linux filesystem — to find it in Linux, navigate to:

/mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive

Inside there you will find the exact path to the folder you shared, and can save files within it — those files will then automatically get synced with Google Drive for you.