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Google ARM Chromebook: HOWTO Install Ubuntu / Fedora / openSUSE

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No sooner had Google released its new Chromebook for $ 249 with a dual-core 1.7 GHz ARM processor as articles about tests of its impressive performance under Ubuntu, about installing Fedora and openSUSE, began to appear on the network. Well, I, in turn, having acquired it in my own hands, could not resist and also launched GNU / Linux on it.

How to configure dual-boot without losing ChromeOS read under habrakatom.

The work is based on the post Andrew Wafaa.

Before starting work


Make sure you have:
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Developer Mode


First of all, to be able to boot another OS on the Chromebook, you need to activate Developer Mode . Please note that during the activation of the Developer Mode all your data will be destroyed! To do this, on the Chromebook turned off, we simultaneously hold down the Esc + Refresh buttons and turn it on by pressing Power. Next, we call Recovery, press Ctrl + D in it, confirm and wait for the system to finish preparing. Upon completion of the preparation, the system will reboot with the already activated developer mode.

Creating a recovery image (optional)


To create it will need another flash drive. To get started, open the special page in the Chromebook: “chrome: // imageburner” and confirm the creation of the image.

Download the system


Next, you should decide on your preferences and download one of the options:

⇒ Personally, I chose Ubuntu Desktop and put it on an SD card. Although all subsequent steps, in most cases, are one-to-one (regardless of the carrier: a USB flash drive or SD card) and for other distributions, or else they need minor changes.

Preparing a bootable SD card


Next, create two partitions using parted and gdisk:

sudo parted /dev/sdX

create GPT table
 mktable gpt

confirm (all data from the flash drive will be lost)
 yes

we leave
 quit

Run gdisk
 sudo gdisk /dev/sdX

and set the alignment of 4M sectors
 x l 8192 m

Now we create two partitions on our SD card (one for the kernel and the other for the root partition):
 n 1 <press enter> +16M 7f00 n 2 <press enter> <press enter> <press enter> w y

Create a file system and mount it:
 sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX2 sudo mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt

Unpack the previously selected distribution:
 cd /mnt sudo tar xvpf ~/Downloads/target_rootfs.tar.bz2

⇒ Attention! Make sure that after unpacking to / mnt / there is the root directory of your distributive.

Support Chromebook


Insert the card into the running chromabook, make sure that ChromeOS saw two sections, and press Ctrl + Alt + T. In the opened window, execute the shell command and get to the console of the Chromebook. Next, run the following commands:
 cd /media/removable/External\ Drive\ 1 sudo cp -r /lib/firmware/* lib/firmware sudo cp -r /lib/modules/* lib/modules sudo vi usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-touchpad.conf >> Section "InputClass" >> Identifier "touchpad" >> MatchIsTouchpad "on" >> Option "FingerHigh" "5" >> Option "FingerLow" "5" >> EndSection sudo cp -r /tmp/chromeos-rootfs/usr/share/alsa/ucm/* usr/share/alsa/ucm

Kernel and bootloader


 cd /tmp echo "console=tty1 debug verbose root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 rootwait rw" > /tmp/config vbutil_kernel --pack /tmp/newkern --keyblock\ /usr/share/vboot/devkeys/kernel.keyblock --version 1 --signprivate\ /usr/share/vboot/devkeys/kernel_data_key.vbprivk\ --config=/tmp/config --vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0 --arch arm dd if=/tmp/newkern of=/dev/mmcblk1p1

Activate the ability to download from removable media


To do this, run the following two commands:
 crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 cgpt add -i 1 -S 1 -T 5 -P 10 -l KERN-A /dev/mmcblk1

Loading


Now, having done all the above steps, you can boot into the newly prepared system. During the download of the Chromebook, when the screen displays a warning about the Enabled Developer Mode, you can press Ctrl + U to boot from a USB flash drive (memory card) or Ctrl + D (or just wait 30 seconds) to load the regular ChromeOS.

Impressions of work


First of all, it is worth noting that not everything is working properly yet. For example, at the moment the hardware graphics acceleration is not implemented and there are some difficulties with sound. In general, according to my feelings, installation of applications and their cold start are rather slow. But after starting the application work quite well. So were tested by Firefox, Chromium, Libre Office. In addition, without a hitch, the LAMP application stack was established and started working. Also, in addition to Unity, LXDE and XFCE were successfully loaded and tested. The latter, as for me, is much more comfortable for working on a chromebook.

LAMP, Chromium, Terminal:


Unity, GIMP, recursion


Libre Office Writer:


Additions


According to reviews on the Internet, to enable sound in a loaded distributive, it is advised to
 alsaucm -c DAISY-I2S
But be careful, there were cases when after manipulations with the sound the dynamics of the Chromebook burned out!

The following resources may also be useful to you:

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/162431/

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