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Linux on chromebook (reddthat.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I'm looking at picking up a used chromebook for my kid to use after installing a Linux OS on it. So I have two questions that are very related:

Which would be a better one to get: Lenovo S330 or Acer CB3-431. Is one going to be easier to get the OS to run on?

The other question is which distro is going to work the easiest? I have been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on my person computer (Fedora currently) and my phone (PinePhonePro with Debian (well, Mobian anyways)) so I'm very comfortable with Linux in general, but haven't played with this kind of hardware before so I'm not sure what the limitations will be.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The CB3-431 is device name EDGAR. You'd most likely pull the write protect screws and flash a UEFI payload into the firmware, probably using Mr. Chromebox's tooling and payloads. Most modern Chromebooks boot Coreboot with a depthcharge payload, and it can either be coerced to boot something different with a lot of effort, or easily swapped with a Tianocore UEFI payload to make it behave like a normal PC. Once flashed, it's an ordinary Braswell generation PC with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

The S330 is an ARM machine built on a Mediatech MT8173C. Installing normal Linux on ARM Chromebooks is substantially less well-established, but often possible. It looks like those are doable but you won't get graphics acceleration, and the bootloader situation is a little klutzy.

Of the two, the CB3-431will be easier and better documented to bend to your will.

The major limitation with Chromebooks is really just that there isn't much onboard storage, so you'll want to pick reasonably light software (A distro where you pick packages on a small base install or at least a lighter spin will be preferable) and avoid storage-intensive distros (eg. Nix or the immutable-core-plus-containers schemes whose packaging models have substantial storage overhead are probably unsuitable). You may have a little hassle with sound because many Chromebooks have a goofy half-soc-half-external-codec sound layout for which the Linux tooling is still improving - a pair of annoying PipeWire and Kernel bugs that sometimes cause them to come up wrong and spew log messages got fixed last week but aren't in a release yet.

They aren't fancy machines, but hacked used Chromebooks make great beaters.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the detailed answer and pointing me towards the Mr. Chromebox tooling. I picked up the used Acer CB3 for $30 and was able to install the custom UEFI firmware and then install Gallium OS without too much hassle. Like you said, not a fancy machine, but hard to beat that price.

this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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