Converting a Chromebook into a Linux laptop

darethehair wrote: ↑ There are two (or three) ways to use Linux on a Chromebook. You need to decide which one best suits your needs and abilities.

- *Inside* of Chrome OS (via 'crouton'), easy, limited choice of distributions to chose from
or
- *Outside* of Chrome OS (via 'dual booting'), more complex, many more choices of distributions to chose from

I believe that almost any (?) Chromebook can use the 'crouton' method, but subtle hardware differences between various Chromebook models makes some more or less able to run a desired Linux distro via 'dual booting'. I personally have experience with both methods, on various Acer/ASUS/Dell Chromebooks/Chromeboxes. In all cases you need to activate 'developer mode' to get started. For the 'dual booting' technique, you have to enable the ability to boot from USB -- and possiblity to do so you may need to replace the firmware in order to do so.

The 'crouton' method uses space on the Chromebook's internal SSD/eMMC, or possibly USB/SD card external storage. The 'dual boot' method can either use space on the SSD/eMMC (via partitioning to make space for the Linux distro = a bit riskier), or again on USB/SD card. My own 'preferred' method these days is 'dual-booting' Linux from an external USB 3.0 compact stick.

Installing and running Linux is not all that difficult, but if you have never done it before, there is a lot to learn about.

I have a detailed web page talking about my experiences, but it might be overwhelming at first, so this is just a short explanation of what your options are. Let me know if you want more

P.S. Gallium Linux is a distro designed specifically for Chromebooks (all required/desired tweaking has already been done). I do not use this distro myself, but it is popular, and this page shows that this particular Chromebook is 'compatible' with it:

Hardware Compatibility - GalliumOS Wiki

This Chromebook is an Acer Chromebook 11 (model CB3-131-C5RA), which is one of the 'Bay Trail' Intel CPU line. As an example of another popular Chromebook, the Acer R11, which has a 'Braswell' CPU, and for this model is NOT completely compatible with running Linux 'dual boot'.

darethehair wrote: ↑ OK, you asked for it!

Dare's Chromeos Page

This is probably going to be big 'overkill' for you, but I created it so that I would be able to reproduce my success in the future. One step at-a-time. Go slow. Ask questions.

If you want 'easy success', my advise would be to pick one of the popular 'crouton' options. The next easiest would probably be 'Gallium' (never tried it myself) with 'dual-boot', but for that you need the firmware fixes, USB booting/installing, etc.. Let us know how it goes!

For myself, I wanted Mint Linux (for dual-boot), since that is what I use everywhere else, and it works great and looks nice. For the 'crouton' option, there is no such choice -- so I had to make it more difficult for myself by using 'Debian' + 'Cinnamon Desktop' -- which is a pretty good approximation of the look&feel of Linux Mint.

My thoughts on using 'chrx' to partition the internal SSD/eMMC drive to make room for Linux: That used to be my primary method, and it worked OK (especially when I replaced the internal SSD with a larger version), but one day my dual-booting got messed up, and I had to *recover* my Chromebook (a bit drastic but easy) -- and I lost my Linux partition entirely by doing so. From then on, I took the safer/easier approach and installed Linux onto a Sandisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 drive (small form factor) -- not quite as fast as SSD, but fast enough on the Chromebook USB 3.0 port.

darethehair wrote: ↑ Some brief answers, for now:

1. On my Chromebook(s), I use 64gb and 128gb Sandisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 sticks for dual-booting. Due to a very strange bug/behavior in the 32gb version, it *cannot* properly boot any OS (at least not the generation that I tried). Advice: buy some during the next sale on Amazon.ca (Boxing Day?). On my Chromebox, I dual-boot Linux on a portable *external* USB 3.0 drive (whatever size, like 1TB or 2TB).

2. Remember, it is 'crouton' *or* 'dual-boot'. With crouton installed on a Chromebook, you start a Linux session *within* the running Chrome OS itself, from a shell/terminal tab session. With dual-boot, you have either have Linux installed on an internal or external drive, are reboot *into* your Linux-of-choice that way -- Chrome OS/crouton has nothing to do with it.

3. If you use the 'dual-boot' approach, any Linux distro that you installed on the USB drive is the one you can use -- in fact (as with regular Linux machines) -- you can have multiple Linux distros on one hard drive, and pick whichever you want at that moment. Is this what you meant?

4. Yes, my impression is that SD cards are (much?) slower that USB drives, but (of course) if you use a slow cheap USB 2.0 drive, it might actually be slower than a fast SD card. From my experiments on running 'crouton' from an SD card, I wasn't very happy with *reliability* of SD for doing that.

5. Yes, for some types of firmware changes required, you might need to remove the 'write protect screw' inside the Chromebook. On my website, I show where it is for the Acer model that I have. If you run the 'Mr Chromebox' firmware script, it should tell you if you need to do that for what you want to do. For example, one of the changes that I like to make is to remove the annoying window that shows up when 'developer mode' is activated (for doing all of this crouton/dual-boot stuff) -- and replace it with a dark screen that avoids the risk of someone hitting the 'space' bar and turning off developer mode -- which would erase all my hard work! For simply allowing dual-boot from USB port, I don't think I needed to remove the 'write protect screw' on my Acer. For the 'crouton' method, you do not need to mess around with it either.

NOTE: In a previous thread you mentioned the desire to *replace* Chrome OS with Linux. You can do that if you want, but I prefer the 'best of both worlds' approach where I can either pick Chrome OS *or* Linux.

darethehair wrote: ↑ Well, if your ultimate goal is to *replace* Chrome OS, then I guess there is not much benefit to the 'crouton' approach. Suggestion: when you try the 'dual-boot' method, make sure that your USB device can successfully be used to boot your Linux on a different machine -- so that you can be confident that your media actually works (and not blame the Chromebook for any difficulty that may arise).

P.S. My entire web server is currently running a text-only 'crouton' environment inside a used eBay Dell Chromebook 11 laptop. I got it cheap since the screen wasn't working, but during my initial efforts to remove the screen entirely, I got it working again my re-seating the monitor connector cable. Linux is *so* cool!

darethehair wrote: ↑ Good post for those interested in the topic!

So are you dual-booting, or did you wipe ChromeOS?

drdtyc wrote: ↑ One question: After wiping out ChromeOS, I then realized that I should have taken a backup of the stock ChromeOS image on a USB drive before wiping it out. Is there a mean to get hold of the stock ChromeOS image? I do not think I can switch back to ChromeOS Developer Mode any more as there is no ChromeOS.

drdtyc wrote: ↑ To answer my own question, I have found a guide of how to download the stock ChromeOS image for any Chromebook which is running Linux and with no ChromeOS on the main drive.
http://www.fascinatingcaptain.com/blog/ ... chrome-os/

Very easy to make a recovery USB drive of the ChromeOS image for my ChromeBook.
Thanks to the author of that guide.

google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/gdrive_local

JHW wrote: ↑ This thread is a great resource. I used to use Crouton to run Ubuntu on my Acer C720. It worked well but other users kept writing over the boot info that permits access to the Crouton install.

Is it possible to configure a Chromebook to boot into something like Gallium OS from a USB stick, without making modifications to the Chromebook hardware? I now have an Acer R11.

JHW wrote: ↑ This thread is a great resource. I used to use Crouton to run Ubuntu on my Acer C720. It worked well but other users kept writing over the boot info that permits access to the Crouton install.

Is it possible to configure a Chromebook to boot into something like Gallium OS from a USB stick, without making modifications to the Chromebook hardware? I now have an Acer R11.

darethehair wrote: ↑ On the R11, I found that I needed to remove the write-protect screw (no big deal) in order to:

- change the firmware to permit the USB alternative OS booting that I wanted
- remove the obnoxious white warning screen that occurs after 'developer' mode is activated (and replace it with a black screen with small white lettering)

Using the same MrChromebox scripts, you can also:

- change the bootup choice delay from 30s down to 1s
- change the default boot device from the internal SSD/eMMC to the USB external device instead (I prefer that ChromeOS remain the default, but I like the 1s boot delay)

doradxplorer wrote: ↑ If the chromebook had the google play store by default, I think that might be better overall. I personally would like one where I can do some quick video/photo edits using some photo and video editing apps in the play store.

drdtyc wrote: ↑ Now that I have wiped out ChromeOS from the main drive, I do not think I can re-run the MrChromeBox firmware flashing script to change the white screen to black. This is because my Chromebook cannot be booted up to ChromeOS Developer Mode without ChromeOS on the main drive. Such is the missing prerequisite on my Chromebook to run the firmware flashing script.

Is this correct? Is there any alternative way to run the flashing script?

cd; curl -LO https://mrchromebox.tech/firmware-util.sh && sudo bash firmware-util.sh