Debating over installing Crouton on my Chromebook. It only has 32GB of internal storage but I do like having BASH and Steam. Termux doesn’t fully cut it. Steam on crossover is wonky due to it being a container in a container.
If you don’t know what crouton is it is running GNU/Linux alongside Chrome OS in a chroot (shares the same kernel.)
The Chromebook is a Samsung Chromebook Pro.
- Don’t Install Crouton
- Install Crouton without GUI
- Install Crouton with GUI
What about flashing a coreboot image with SeaBIOS and installing a proper distro? You’d lose the ability to run ChromeOS (at least easily), but you’d have a fully featured distribution.
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I like having the android apps, though. Wonder if I could install the the rest of the OS on an SD card?
I think the issue is that in order to boot chromeOS, you need the Depthcharge payload but to boot traditional PC distros you need SeaBIOS. AFAIK you can’t change between the payloads without reflashing your BIOS. I suppose you could write a shutdown script to flash the desired BIOS depending on which OS you plan on rebooting into, but that seems less than ideal.
EDIT: apparently it is possible to have both payloads and dual boot using the technique described here
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What I was thinking is to try to go the crouton route but install the GUI and /home folder on a micro SD card.
Crouton would be the simplest, most direct route to take for “dual booting” a Linux distribution inside ChromeOS.
Although I could have sworn there was a way to install Linux literally alongside ChromeOS without the necessity of Crouton or similar software through the Developer Options Console on the ChromeOS side of things during the actual boot process.
Footnote: Subject to correction as I’m reciting this directly from memory. Unable to verify this at the moment since I’m mucking around with an install of FuschiaOS.
Edit: Already described above by @Shawnanastasio.
I know there is an incoming update there will be options for KVM and docker in ChromeOS without having to use developer mode. Will have to do some research into crouton on how you can install the file system.
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Should be plenty of material published for that endeavor already if I’m not mistaken with how to map it to an external drive as well. Though my personal preference would be to simply perform an install directly alongside the existing operating system.
32GB makes that difficult. Unless I can install it on a Micro SD card. There is much info on this with my model.
Then in your case there is definitely information available on how to map Crouton’s setup to an external drive, or for all intents and purposes, an SD card in lieu of an external drive. I believe that namely consists of simply “fooling” the Crouton setup into believing the SD card to be the actual external drive.
Footnote: Double check this information before you take it as verbatim. Most of my comments here consist of recalling details from memory.
Will do plan on making this my project for next week. Picking up a USB C flash drive so I can put my music and movies on that.
Idea here is to have Chrome, Android and GNU/Linux on one device. Have your cake and eat it too setup in a extremely compact and flexible package
It can be done with carefull research and the implementation of that research easy enough.
Yeah it can be done. Nice.
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And that’s a wrap upon that one.