Setting up cron jobs under crouton

As per ticket 957:

crouton doesn't use upstart, so you need to run crond explicitly, probably from the chroot's /etc/rc.local. Look inside /etc/init/cron for the commands needed to launch crond.

So edit /etc/rc.local and add the following line before exit 0:

exec cron

This will start the cron process as root for the system. Being the case, any cron jobs added at the user level will not work (ie anything added using the command crontab -e). For this reason you will have to add crons to the /etc/crontab file.