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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

The “news” section shows the last release was in 2019. Not that it matters really. I never used gallium, because other distros just worked. Flash the bios with mr chromebox firmware and install whatever. I’ve been using Ubuntu 14 now 18 on an old acer for 9 years now, no issues other than its very very low powered by today’s standards.

Edit to add the one thing I did have to was install gallium keybindings which support the funky chrome book function keys.

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Mr.Chromebox is the MVP when it comes to running alt OS on Chromebooks, His Coreboot/Seabios[1] is the UEFI ROM which enables it. He also actively answers queries in the r/chultrabook & r/GalliumOS subreddits.

Gallium OS is needed because of some weird quirks with certain Chromebooks e.g. BayTrail chipsets require special drivers for Touchpad, microphone etc. from ChromeOS and only Gallium OS include them.

If you can get hold of a 11" Chromebook, Then installing Linux on it using Coreboot is the least expensive way to get a portable Linux computer with keyboard as Chromebooks are often subsidized.

Just ensure that the device is supported by Coreboot beforehand.

[1] https://mrchromebox.tech/

Intel BayTrail chipsets are well supported by some distros such as Fedora nowadays. Does the ChromeOS hardware come with additional quirks?

> Intel BayTrail chipsets are well supported by some distros such as Fedora nowadays

Sorry, I meant Braswell. At one point, Installing other OS on Braswell damaged its speakers[1] which are now resolved with latest Mr.Chromebox's firmware + OS level fixes. There are still issues with Microphone even with GalliumOS.

Also ChromeOS has Chrome Multi Touch (CMT) touchpad driver which is much better than default driver and are included in Gallium OS, But since GalliumOS is not developed further it's better to go for other OS.

> Does the ChromeOS hardware come with additional quirks?

I understand that you question was related to Intel BayTrail, But I'm using it to mention that there are certain hardware deviations w.r.t Chromebooks like inclusion Google Security Chip (GSC)[2].

[1] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Support/Braswell

[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec/+/c...

Is Braswell hardware reasonably common outside Chromebooks? AIUI, Cherry Trail (e.g. MS Surface 3) was released alongside Braswell and is now well supported in some mainline distros at least.

I imagine some of the use-case scenarios have dwindled because recent Chromebooks have come with the innate ability to run Android or Linux apps.

So the die-hard users that want to turn their Chromebook into a GNU+Linux laptop still look at Gallium. But the ones that just wanted to run a few Android/Linux-specific tools without needing to blow the entire OS away have found easier options.

> The “news” section shows the last release was in 2019.

I noticed this too... is this project dead?

> Flash the bios with mr chromebox firmware...

I had not heard of this path before; is it a one-way trip to load linux on a Chrome OS device this way or can it be reverted to factory settings (when it's time to pawn the device off on someone else)?

I think they recommend just using normal Ubuntu now that most of the drivers have been upstreamed.

I've never actually done this, but the process of flashing the firmware prompts you to back up the original firmware and I'm pretty sure you can just put it back on

My experience with this, and I'll stress that I'm sure it varies by device, is that using the Mr. Chromebox firmware to install GalliumOS works great, until you allow the device to be put to sleep or run out of battery. Then the firmware is restored to the original, without any user request.

This blocks you from booting your Linux environment again but is otherwise non-destructive (you can just run Mr. Chromebox again to get the necessary firmware re-installed)

(My device is a HP Chromebook 14")

Did you do the full firmware replacement or just the legacy boot slot? I have one of the early Acer Chromebooks and saw warnings about similar behavior if you did just the legacy slot, but if you open the case and remove the write protect screw and flash a full firmware, you wouldn't have any change when you run out of battery.

I was under the impression that is not an option on the Chromebook 14" from HP. But I have never disassembled the thing, so if there is a write-protect screw in there, I won't have seen it anyway...

I don't really mind, it doesn't harm the secondary partition at all, (it's more annoying that it cannot restore from sleep, than what happens if I forget to honor the fact that it cannot go to sleep properly...)

I could configure it so that it just won't go to sleep, but I'd rather have to run a script and restore the functioning firmware, than wake up to a chromebook with completely drained battery (and whatever filesystem corruption might come after ceasing writes to the filesystem in the middle of whatever happens due to an abrupt loss of power and when it's not "going to sleep" at the time.)

Ok I looked around, and there's several models of 'HP Chromebook 14', the earliest model has a screw, but the rest of them have a security device CR50 which you can unlock with a special debugging cable and a procedure which might be more trouble than it's worth ;)

I think it's kind of neat the way that it fails. It would be very easy for someone to accidentally poof and it's been factory reset if they didn't know how to handle this. I'm talking four mis-keystrokes easy. And a puzzle to solve in case it has fallen into the wrong hands? Sign me up, I guess!

I miss updates from GalliumOS, I guess it's time to move on, but I don't know if I could ever get all of the nice comfort features they built into their distro to be fully replicated on any other modern Linux distro of any kind that isn't specially focused on being a Linux distro for Chromebooks, like Gallium was!

Looks like their repo has gone a bit quiet as well.

https://github.com/GalliumOS

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