Unity desktop not registering clicks

[shadyhill]

I'm trying to help my son get Ubuntu installed on his Lenovo Chromebook. We just went through the steps in issue #4958 and got unity-desktop to install. But when we do sudo startunity the screen goes black. We can see the mouse, but nothing else. What my son figured out is that if we close the laptop and open it up again, the Unity desktop is there. But if we click on anything, same thing happens – nothing re-renders on screen until we close the laptop and re-open it again, at which point the click will have registered. It seems like the screen just isn't refreshing.

Are there other utilities we were supposed to install with the crouton command to make sure all the functionality is in place?