Getting the Latest Chrome OS Update Quicker

Google has released the first set of updates for the Chrome OS beta and dev channels. However, the update can take a few days to install on your Cr-48 as Google offers the update gradually to machines, not all at once. If you want to try out the latest now, it's possible to speed up the process with the following commands run as root. Note that they hit Google's servers somewhat more frequently so I don't recommend doing this to much. It should definitely only be done when you know there is an update out. Lines starting with # are just comments explaining what I'm doing, they don't need to be typed.

#stop the normal background update engine process.

#It runs at a very low priority by default meaning updates can take a long time

initctl stop update-engine

#start the update-engine process running in the foreground

#and with errors reported to the shell. The & gives us our shell back

update_engine -foreground -logtostderr &

#run the upgrade check in a constant loop till Google's

#servers offer us the update. Once that starts, we can end this process with CTRL+C
#this command should be entered all on one line (the blog wraps the text)

while true; do update_engine_client -check_for_update; update_engine_client -update; pause 5; done

Using this method, I managed to snag the beta and dev updates within 15-20 minutes of starting the process.

Note that if you update to the 0.10.142.3 dev release, you can switch back to the beta channel but there's no automatic downgrade process, you'll still be on the dev build until a beta build comes out that is a higher version number than your current dev build. You could also use the manual USB recovery method to drop back to beta channel.