Difference between revisions of "Chrome OS devices"

Revision as of 12:21, 19 September 2013

This article is to provide information on how to get Arch up and running on the Chromebook series of laptops (or netbooks) as built by Samsung, Acer, Google.

Discussion of this topic began in this forum thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=148602

Initially written with the intention of getting a Samsung Series 5 550 to dual boot with Arch. (Only reason for the dual boot is to potentially collect firmware changes pushed downward from Chromeos).

General Chromebook Installation

Pre-requisites

You should claim your free 100GB-1TB of Google Drive space before you install Arch. This needs to happen from ChromeOS(version > 23), not linux. This will sync/backup ChromeOS, as designed.

Developer Mode

Developer Mode information on all models is at http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices.

First, enable developer mode on your Chromebook. Although everything in the "Downloads" area syncs to your Google Drive account, this will delete data stored on the hard or solid state drive.

Repartitioning

A script referenced from http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html points to the shell script at http://goo.gl/i817v and discusses repartitioning. The script should be run as the chronos user.

cgpt command

You'll save your self a lot of time if you understand this command before you attempt to install Arch on a chromebook.

This is NON-EXHAUSTIVE but it'll help most people reading this. cgpt --help is nice too.

Use:

cgpt showpartiton /dev/sda

to list all partitions on disk with boot information for each.

Use:

cgpt add [options] /dev/sda

used to modify boot options

Example

 cgpt add -i 6 -P 5 -S 0 -T 1 /dev/sda

Example: modify partition #6, set priority to 5, successful to false, and boot tries to once(1), on device /dev/sda

cgpt add -i 1-12 

Partition number to change

cgpt add -P 9-0

Priority 9 > 1 (Higher number will try to boot first)

cgpt add -T 0-99

Tries, used with the successful flag. Will try to boot this partition x times until tries = 0 then it will try next lower priority partition.

cgpt add -S 0-1

Successful flag, if 1 will try to boot this partition forever. Be careful with this one! If 0 and tries > 0 it will try to boot this partition until it' out of tries.

If installing yourself, don't forget to copy this onto your arch partition!.

Samsung Series 5 550

Developer Mode

Developer mode on the Samsung Series 5 has two levels of access, "dev-switch on" and "dev-mode BIOS". With the first level you enable a command line shell, which lets you look around inside the GNU/Linux operating system, but does not let you run your own versions.

The second level of access installs a special BIOS component that provides the ability to boot your own operating systems from either removable (USB/SD) or fixed (SSD) drives. Both levels of access are completely reversible, so don't be afraid to experiment.

The second level (described above) is what we want in order to install Arch.

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-series-5-chromebook/b.jpg

The switch is behind a little door on the right-hand side of the chromebook (as linked above). To enable the developer switch you open the door, use something pointy (paperclip or toothpick) to move the switch towards the back of the device, and reboot.