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Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

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Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#11

Post by avian »

All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning on each boot. In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop.

You can flash the first stage bootloader to remove that warning, but that is not documented well (if you can call several contradictory forum threads documentation), involves taking the laptop apart and gives you exactly one try: it either works or bricks the device permanently.

In addition to that, at least Samsung's Chromebooks are not very well designed and can be seriously damaged from userspace when running a general-purpose distribution (Google for burning speakers on ARM Chromebook for instance)

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#12

Post by rwmj »

avian wrote: post #11

All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning on each boot . In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop. You can flash the first stage bootload…

Agree with all your points. On the other hand, these are cheap, widely available A15 devices with a reasonable amount of RAM, and that has a certain appeal for people who need ARM-based developer machines (we used them for porting Fedora, KVM, libvirt, libguestfs and the virt tools to ARM).

Also I used one for 2+ weeks exclusively (running Fedora 18) and it wasn't that bad:

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/some-thoughts-after-2-5...

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#13

Post by greenido »

rwmj wrote: post #10

Lots of other distros work on the Chromebook (and have for longer). Here's for example Fedora 19 and Arch Linux instructions: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes... http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chro... The next challenge is getting KVM working. The Chromebook has an A15 chip which has hardware assisted virtualization. Unfortunately the firmware disables HYP mode, bu…

Agree... It's on my list to check Fedora.

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#15

Post by jdn »

avian wrote: post #11

All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning on each boot . In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop. You can flash the first stage bootload…

The developer mode warning only occurs on boot, as you say. Having owned by the ARM Chromebook and the Pixel since both were released, I've probably seen that warning less than 8 times since install. The Chromebooks very rarely need to be turned off, and the one time that does happen often, on update restarts, actually bypasses that warning.

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#17

Post by pm215 »

rwmj wrote: post #10

Lots of other distros work on the Chromebook (and have for longer). Here's for example Fedora 19 and Arch Linux instructions: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes... http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chro... The next challenge is getting KVM working. The Chromebook has an A15 chip which has hardware assisted virtualization. Unfortunately the firmware disables HYP mode, bu…

No, the firmware doesn't disable Hyp mode; it just starts the kernel in Secure-SVC, rather than in Hyp mode. It's pretty trivial to get from Secure-SVC to Hyp in the bootloader before starting the kernel -- there are u-boot patches floating about which do it.

http://www.virtualopensystems.com/media/chromebook/chromeboo... is probably a good place to start if you want to tinker.

As far as I can tell the main issue with the Chromebook is that there's no one organization who's taking responsibility for making sure fixes and changes like this get upstream, so every distro/person ends up reinventing or locally maintaining patches.

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#18

Post by avian »

jdn wrote: post #15
avian wrote: post #11

All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning on each boot . In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop. You can flash the first stage bootload…

The developer mode warning only occurs on boot, as you say. Having owned by the ARM Chromebook and the Pixel since both were released, I've probably seen that warning less than 8 times since install. The Chromebooks very rarely need to be turned off, and the one time that does happen often, on update restarts, actually bypasses that warning.

It really depends what you want to do. If you just run a chroot inside the stock ChromeOS then what you say is true.

But if you're dual-booting to another Linux distribution or just replace ChromeOS altogether (that's another issue with the linked article: what it describes is not a dual-boot) you can't escape frequent reboots. Especially due to flaky suspend/sleep mode support in other distros.

Re: Install Ubuntu On Your Chromebook

#19

Post by broodbucket »

avian wrote: post #11

All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning on each boot . In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop. You can flash the first stage bootload…

On regular laptops, you open the lid and press the "On" button.

On my Chromebook, it boots as soon as you open the lid, and so I press Ctrl-D instead of the "On" button. I thought it'd be a pain, but it doesn't bother me at all, and you say that makes it "practically useless"?

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