GalliumOS – Lightweight Linux for Chromebooks | Hacker News Reader

GalliumOS – Lightweight Linux for Chromebooks

galliumos.org

GalliumOS is a wonderful project. It has turned my $150 chromebook into a fully-fledged dev machine that works perfectly including all the fiddly things like sleep/wake, screen brightness, volume keys and secondary displays. And I get around 9 hours battery.

The 11GB hard drive space I had left after installation was plenty big enough for all the tools and libraries I need, and I added a 64GB SD card for archiving and media.

Since the chromebook (a CB3-131) is so cheap and compact, I take it everywhere, and I wouldn't really care if I lost it or dropped it down the stairs. This confirms my belief that when it comes to buying laptops, one should either go really cheap (<$250) or really expensive ($1000+). There is a no-mans-land between the two where the quality is generally poor but the price is still too high to be blase about your kit.

I see the CB3-131 is on the GalliumOS hardware compatibility list (https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility) now, under Intel Bay Trail, and supposedly works with ChromeOS as a dual boot option. However, the installation guide (https://wiki.galliumos.org/Installing) links to https://wiki.galliumos.org/Installing/Preparing as a first step, which says "On Bay Trail Chromebooks, you will have to flash your firmware. Luckily, John Lewis' script makes it a very straight forward process. Unfortuantely, you'll have to open up your Chromebook. Also note that after completing this process, you will no longer be able to run Chrome OS on your Chromebook, so no dualbooting for this one I'm afraid."

This contradicts the entry in the HCL. Is this true? Were you able to get your CB3-131 to dual boot?

I did not try to dual-boot, I just flashed the BIOS and nuked the hard drive as per the instructions (which were clear and accurate).

From the links you provide, it seems there may be a way to use chrx to get dual boot working. Perhaps ask on the reddit? [0]

Honestly though, the limited hard drive space is better given to Linux than ChromeOs.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/galliumos/

Please share the link to these instructions. Specifically for hard drive nuking. I installed Arch Linux on my CB3-111 last night and am using an external USB drive while I figure out how to wipe the internal disk clean.

once you've diabled write protection (often just a screw), fdisk/cfdisk/parted will wipe the drive.

Dual-boot on Bay Trail is a very recent development and not all of the docs have been updated yet.

https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility is correct.

https://wiki.galliumos.org/Firmware and https://chrx.org/ have more detailed information.

Specifically which chromebook?

I've had good results with GalliumOS on a Chromebook C720P. if you want better graphics, upgrade to a C740 with a Core i3. Otherwise, C710 can take 16GB of RAM, if you're okay with the weak CPU.

Make sure you get an Intel chipset chromebook. That's most of them. You won't find much difference in them, other than that.

>There is a no-mans-land between the two where the quality is generally poor but the price is still too high to be blase about your kit.

Here's a life pro tip: This applies to pretty much every product.

Did you have any issues with Wifi/Display Brightness/Keybindings when setting up your chromebook? I haven't seen many posts by CB3-131 users and I've been having some issues (posted about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GalliumOS/comments/4colnc/keybindin...)

For everyone wondering why this exists, it has fixes for things that aren't included in the kernel regularly. Along with that it's just as lightweight as possible. A boluddy of mine runs fedora on his Chromebook, with a weird combo of a tiling window manager, and KDE, and doesn't have a capacity problem. So if this is optimized for Chromebooks, I'm sure it's even better in that regard.

which is described in more details here:

https://wiki.galliumos.org/About_GalliumOS

> Optimizations that eliminate system stalls and improve overall responsiveness.

what would those be, and why are they specific to this distro?

EDIT: found info at https://wiki.galliumos.org/About_GalliumOS , probably this should be linked in the homepage.

Why use Gallium over crouton?

I've used crouton/XUbuntu as my main laptop OS for a couple of years. I've pushed it pretty far, running Steam with a removable SD card to play things like DotA 2 - http://www.aaronbell.com/how-to-run-dota-on-a-chromebook/

Chromebooks are amazingly capable once you add a little storage and update the video drivers.

This is maybe an OT reply, but crouton / dualboot still brings up the scare-screen on boot. Which is fine if you're a dev.

Not so good when you hand the computer to your brother-in-law to check out a web page, he opens it up

OS VERIFICATION OFF PRESS SPACE TO RE-ENABLE

and of course presses space and wipes your whole environment :(

Yes this was me :(

So, enabling OS verification wipes the data on the Chromebook or what?

Yes, it detects that the OS have been tampered with when you have dual boot or use crouton and nukes the disc with a clean install.

Yes, every time you enable or disable OS verification the whole eMMC flash memory is deleted.

For me, the main reason I keep checking out options to run a regular linux distro vs. chromeOS/crouton is to be able to run kernel modules like KVM. Android Studio requires KVM to be able to run the emulator at anything greater than glacial speed.

I actually once built a custom chromiumOS build with kvm enabled and was able run both Android emulator as well as Windows 7 for Office :-) But it proved to be too much of a hassle to rebuild updates over time.

I hope linux will beat OSX on dev machines. We will see where Wayland/Mir will bring us.

That was once the case, before circa 2007 or so.

Do most people setting up a Chromebook to run on Linux wipe ChromeOS or use crouton?

If anyone has had luck with a fully functioning non/ChromeOS let me know what distribution you prefer. Currently I am also considering GalliumOS / NayuOS.

I've read some mixed reviews about using crouton and was curious if it's better to use crouton or to install/flash Linux?

It seems as though crouton could break with ChromeOS updates.

I've used crouton as my main OS before. It was a while ago but I was running Ubuntu 12.10.

Crouton works just fine with ChromeOS updates it doesn't break anything. Personally I ran into some performance issues as well as native hardware compatibility issues (eg you can only adjust volume in ChromeOS.)you also might not enjoy having to boot ChromeOS before you can get to your Linux environment.

For making a fully functioning desktop, Gallium looks the most promising for your needs.

ChromeOS updates will occasionally break something in crouton, but it's usually pretty minor and gets fixed quickly.

I used this: https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download...

To get Linux Mint's Debian Edition running on a chromebox. I went that direction because I'm used to Debian on servers, but Mint does a fair amount of work to get a functional/nice desktop.

I did upgrade the Chromebox to 8GB memory and a 128GB SSD. I also had to upgrade the kernel to get a video driver that was stable on the built-in Intel HD graphics.

I have mine dual booted with arch and it works pretty well. If I'm just passively browsing I usually go to chromeos, anything else I reboot into arch (I figured that'd be annoying at first, but with how quickly both OSes boot its not at all an issue.) They have a pretty extensive guide on the arch wiki as well as device specific guides which could be helpful with other distros too:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chrome_OS_devices

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_C720_Chromebook

I wiped and installed Linux directly. Booting was annoying because it always wanted to recover. Then one day it failed to sleep, ran the battery dos, and lost the "legacy boot" setting leaving me with only the option to recover, wiping my system.

I recovered ChromeOS and gave the machine away.

If I had to use Chromebook hardware, I'd use crouton.

Hugh Greenburg's git repositories (used for GalliumOS) were essential in getting my C720P chromebook working linux. GalliumOS is the only distribution that supports Elantech touchpads out of the box. GalliumOS is the only distribution that has chromebook keyboards working correctly.

I personally owe Hugh a debt of gratitude for all the hard work he has done.

I'm running Gallium an a Samsung Series 5 chromebook. It's a real pleasure to be honest. I had crouton running before, but chrome os updates often trashed the install and it was a pain to get running again.

Only thing I would like really is better battery life - I get somewhere in the region of 3 hours, but my chromebook is pretty old so...

The whole thing reminds me of the netbook days, before Intel and Microsoft basically choked off the concept.

Netbooks are seeing a bit of a revival now, $200-$350 laptops can run windows pretty well now.

Meh. Netbooks to me will always be the early Asus and Acer products with customized Linux launchers (and the various distro spins that came about to improve on that).

Once Intel rolled out Atom with the limited hardware mix rules, and MS put XP on life support under a restrictive license, the netbook was basically dead (or at least a shell of its former self).

Wouldn't this be useless as a primary machine with their <64GB hard disks and no Google Drive support ? Anyone care to share their experience with this as their primary laptop ?

I've been using a Chromebook Pixel (64GB version) as my primary work machine since I received it in 2013, first running Debian and now Arch. You'd be surprised at how well it's held up:

-It only has 4GB of RAM, but that's been enough up to now. Most builds are I/O bound anyway, and the SSD is fast.

-I don't use an external monitor, as the high pixel density of the screen more than makes up for the small size.

-The 64GB can be limiting, but in some ways its been beneficial, as its forced me to actually pay attention to backups.

-These days, if I have a long-running/high-resource process, I just spin up a VPS and run it there.

I think Google was pretty prescient with the Pixel laptops. When this one isn't enough, I'll be upgrading to the 2015 model.

Fellow 2013 Pixel owner here. Are you using the crouton-arch fork or did you install Arch natively? I ask because I was considering giving crouton-arch a shot, but it looks like it's about a year behind the upstream crouton packages, and considering crouton itself periodically breaks under ChromeOS updates, I don't expect chargh to be very stable.

What's your experience?

Native install for me. I can't compare it with crouton, as I've never even really used ChromeOS. The first thing I did was replace it with Debian. I'm pretty happy with what I have now, though. Everything works out of the box with Arch.

If you're on the fence about going native, you should do what I do: install arch on an SD card and boot from that. Good SD cards these days are plenty fast too, and if you like the native system, you can keep using it from the SD card, or use it to install Arch on the SSD. Just make sure you get an SD card with TRIM, and it'll work fine for long-term use.

I had an Acer C720 for one year in 2014-2015, and ran elementaryOS on it. It was my primary dev machine.

Resources were pretty limited (dual core Celeron, 2Gb RAM, 32Gb SSD) but it ran fine for most of the things (like normal browsing, js and Python development).

Things you CAN'T do on it:

  - Java. Just don't even think about it.
  - the former point implies all the Java IDEs (Eclipse, Intellij)
  - Android, because of disk space and everything else.
  - Games.

Why I loved it:

  - really small and light
  - AMAZING battery life
  - having so little disk space made me pay attention to my usage of it, make backups, and move on a server things I didn't really need.

However I upgraded to a Dell XPS 13 since then, life is much much better now :)

I have an Acer c720 too and I run Java on it. Minecraft, believe it or not runs at 40fps. But I had to find the proprietary drivers.

Are you still running elementaryOS on the XPS? If so, how well does it work?

It works really well - I'm basically in love with Pantheon (which IMHO it's much better than GNOME), and I can't recall encountering any bug in the last year.

However, since it's based on Ubuntu 14.04 the kernel and the software versions are a bit old.

In the next months I will switch to Arch or Nix or Void (to have more recent versions) and I may try to port Pantheon on them.

Depending on the chromebook, upgrading to a bigger ssd is pretty inexpensive.

I have a acer c720 with arch installed alongside chromeos on a $50 128GB ssd: http://www.amazon.com/MyDigitalSSD-Super-Cache-Solid-State/d...

All together I spent $150 for a surprisingly performant on the go machine. The battery life is pretty great as well.

You don't need to buy those off-brand SSDs anymore. 250Gb SSDs have crossed below the 100$ mark now.

I found a model of the Acer C720 with 4GB RAM and it's been my only computer for the last 5 months. The 32GB SSD is not great, but xubuntu + all my dev environment still leaves 40% free. Browsing is fine, never had performance problems when editing either. It runs Clojure on the JVM without issues, but I've never tried/needed to run a full blown IDE. That said, it happily runs Minecraft on medium settings.

There are still a few hiccups with hibernation. Using a tiling WM meant I needed to remap all of the chrome keys to get stuff like brightness and volume working.

I got it refurbished for £120 (~$170) before I set off backpacking in Asia and it's been the perfect laptop. Lightweight and decent battery life.

I do a lot of vector drawing and the trackpad fidelity isn't great, but that's hardly something you can ask for on such a cheap little machine.

On my laptop, I basically use a web browser and ssh (well, mosh). Sometimes I download a movie, but I store them long-term in "teh clouds" so I don't care much about disk space.

Stick one of these in it. 256GB = $80.

http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Elite-Performance-256GB-Speed/dp/B...)

Went to the website. Wanted to see how the install process works because I won't try it if it's too complicated. There's a "download" link and a "donate" link but no docs. I assume the wiki might have some info on this so I go there. Everything above the fold is about community + downloading. Only after scrolling down do I finally see some docs.

Not a huge UX fail, but something I hoped would be easier

I think I'm going to give this a shot on my daughters Chromebook. I tried Ubuntu on in a couple of times, but it always seems that updates are a moving target. I had to do a reinstall and had to try to find the right kernel version where the sound worked, but couldn't go too new because then the trackpad doesn't work.

Now I just need to find someone who will sell a 3:2 aspect ratio machine with 16GB ram to me.

If the computer industry hadn't dropped the ball so badly on laptops I don't think developers would even bother looking at Chromebooks. Ironically written by a part-time dev on a Chromebook.

Google Pixel and Microsoft Surface line both fit the bill for aspect ratio and RAM. One of those is even a Chromebook!

I am not sure Google are still making the Pixel 2 and if they were I don't think they sell it in my country. There could be drama if I use a freight forwarder then need warranty service. Otherwise an LS would probably do me.

The Surface Book looks very good. I have stopped laughing at the Surface line of products. If I wasn't so attached to unixy tools and environment I might be tempted. They are a bit pricey here and likely a big risk as far as linux driver support. Apple and Android tablets have also avoided 16:9 though don't enter consideration. Not sure what I could do with a Pixel C or iPad Pro apart from playing Minecraft PE.

You have to wonder what all the laptop makers know that Google, Apple and Microsoft don't. They still insist on putting shiny widescreen television panels in laptops.

I mostly use my chromebook as intended - all chrome apps, even though I have crouton installed. It is quite nice for what it is. I would prefer something more powerful for a daily driver and I think the fact people are looking at linux on chromebooks has a lot to do with the failures of manufacturers to produce what many customers want.

I've been developing on a chromebook running Ubuntu.

Is this any better? Anyone have experience with both?

> ARM models are not supported: they do not ship with compatible firmware, and custom firmware is not presently available

Can someone this explain this more?

I was hoping to blow the dust off my original Samsung Chromebook.

Depending on the model you may want to try https://archlinuxarm.org

All Chromebooks since 2013 use the same code base, no matter the architecture (coreboot + depthcharge).

People have problems on non-x86 because there's no default replacement for depthcharge that can be made to work with ~0 effort.

I was hoping to have this on my Asus Chromebook Flip. A lot of the ARM machines are wonderfully thin and light with very impressive battery life. It would be great if they could get full-fledged OSes as well.

Crouton works perfectly, but it would be nice if I could give a Linux distro the full 16GB of eMMC instead of X gigabytes of disk image within the 16GB.

Bonus points if I could dual-boot Android and GalliumOS on an ARM laptop. That would be killer.

I can't speak for other ARM chromebooks but I was able to install Debian on my Asus C201 just fine, why would this be any different, or are the tweaks incompatible?

Anyone else just simply say "wo way" to flashing a custom firmware? That's a lot of trust, no?

I know Google snoops on me, but Google was already snooping on me.

The custom firmware options are open source, so you would be miles ahead of where you started with the factory firmware.

The factory firmware is just as open.

Parts of the factory firmware are open, including coreboot and SeaBIOS (where applicable) -- but not the whole ROM, and none of the build configurations are published, as far as I know.

I'd love to be wrong though, so I'd appreciate pointers to any sources.

Except for files that cannot be redistributed (because silicon vendor silliness), everything is open: scripts, ebuilds, configurations, sources. GalliumOS can't be more open than that (hence my "just as open" qualifier).

When it comes to coreboot and libpayload (same tree, really), everything on ChromeOS' main development branches is pushed upstream. depthcharge is a Chrome OS project, so it is its own upstream. Same for ChromeEC.

There are boards that never make it to the main branches - but that doesn't mean that stuff is kept secret, it's just that for firmware, Chrome OS uses separate branches (because things shouldn't change too much in firmware that's in the field). So at some point when the reference design stabilized, a firmware branch is created. Any support for spin-off devices happens in that branch only (because who knows what happened to master in the meantime?).

In general, the branch naming scheme is {firmware,factory}-$board_name-$some_version_number.

For coreboot on veyron (ARM, Rockchip RK3288, firmware all open source with _no_ blobs), the configuration is in https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/cor..., for example. Compared to the master branch, they're at a different location - but that's because things moved in master in the meantime (third_party/coreboot/configs used to be the canonical location).

If stuff seems missing, a good place to ask for pointers is #chromium-os on Freenode (but it's a low-volume channel, so please wait for an answer, and maybe repeat the question after a couple of hours).

Disclosure: I work on upstream coreboot and Chrome OS firmware.

Thank you for the info.

The work on third-party firmware is not directly a part of GalliumOS, but the projects are symbiotic. You've probably encountered the folks who focus on firmware in other venues as well.

I know booting arbitrary Linux distros is not a goal of factory firmware builds, but often it's almost there -- just not fully implemented, or not fully tested. If you're in any way involved in keeping that functionality alive, we appreciate it.

Neat, but I'm not sure how much better it is over my current solution (I run Lubuntu on a C720 with an upgraded SSD, and use cros-haswell-modules.sh every now and then to rebuild the touchpad kernel modules and such).

It would be interesting to have more information on what exactly it does (regarding the touchpad, at least). Wiki's a bit light on details (or screenshots, by that matter).

That said, it's nice to know this exists - I might try it before upgrading to 16.04 in a couple of months.

Plain Ubuntu / Unity / GNOME works.. out of the box the only problem is the touchpad that need some mainstream love

It's too bad they've (like many others) chosen to be a derivative work of Ubuntu rather than Debian.

Why?

I'd assume he takes issue with Canonical's practices, like the Amazon search tie-in, etc.

As far as I know, Amazon search is only available on the default Ubuntu install. No fork has ever adopted it what so ever.

I don't see how that is relevant. It's enough of a vile business decision to some that it might deter them from even using any Ubuntu-based distro out of principle.

They've admitted their mistake and are/have rolling/rolled it back. No need act like they are the anti-christ.

I'm explaining the mentality of the Debian-only crowd, not my personal beliefs. I've got several Ubuntu-based chroots on my Chromebook.

Is this specific to Chromebooks or would it work on an old netbook?

If you're looking to install Chromium OS on a laptop or netbook, check out Neverware's CloudReady: http://www.neverware.com/

The original CR48 was a netbook by most specs: Atom CPU, 2GB RAM, 16GB SSD. While this distro should work on most netbooks, there's really no reason not to install a lightweight release of a major distro such as Debian. If you choose LXDE or XFCE instead of GNOME/KDE, things should go smoothly.

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