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While it’s an older OS base than I’d have liked, and I’m missing some of the nice quality-of-life improvements Xfce 4.14 & 4.16 offer, it’s still a solid set-up. I also replaced the stock battery applet with one better able to relay battery status at a glance.Īll told, my “Frankenbuntu” is beautiful. I like Gallium OS’s ‘one panel’ desktop layout, but I did change theme, icon set and font tweak the format of the default clock applet and add a few spacers to the bottom panel. I could probably eke a bit more out of it using TLP or something like Slimbook Battery 4. Even the unique Chrome OS keyboard layout and its associated hot keys are correctly mapped too.īut most surprisingly of all is the battery life: it’s fantastic for a 6 year old device. All core hardware “just works” out of the box, including touchscreen, touchpad, wifi, bluetooth, sound, and every port. Yet within these limitations Gallium OS runs much better than Chrome OS did.Īll of the optimisations and performance tweaks Gallium OS devs make for Chromebook hardware become apparent in use. The rest of the device is terrifyingly ancient: dual-core Intel Celeron N3050 processor meagre 16GB eMMC storage and 2GB of RAM - less memory than a severed goldfish! Its vivid 11.6-inch IPS screen (which folds back into a tablet) is its sole redeeming feature. I should stress that the Chromebook I’ve revived was never a speed demon, not even when it was new. Xfce is not a DE I’ve had a lot of hands-on experience with in the past so I’m excited to get the chance to play around. It’s a version based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - yes, 18.04 - and ships with the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment by default. So how well does this Ubuntu-based distro run?
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iso to a USB or SD card (using a different computer, of course), boot from it, try things out, then install. The rest of the process is as you’d expect: flash the relevant OS. But provided you follow the well documented instructions on the Gallium OS wiki you can get through it.
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Reddit is full of stories from people who have. It is possible to damage your device irreparably. Then came the part I was dreading: flashing modified firmware to enable USB booting.
On my 2015-era model this meant: reboot into the Chrome OS recovery mode, pick the developer mode option, then let the device wipe and reset itself.
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The first step to install Gallium OS on my Chromebook was to enable Chrome OS developer mode. You do have to get hands dirty (at the command line) to get things configured correctly.Ĭhromebooks ship with custom firmware that doesn’t let you boot from a USBĪlso, the more recent a Chromebook is, the more hassle it is to load an alternative OS (assuming the hardware is supported by the Linux kernel at all which, despite best efforts, is not a given). Thankfully the reality (for me) wasn’t quite that bad.Ĭhromebooks do ship with custom (and in some cases locked down and read-only) firmware. Stories of bricked devices, broken hardware, and needing to dive into the guts of a machine to extract write protection mechanisms from the motherboard!
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When researching how to install Linux on a Chromebook I have to confess that the process read like a horror show. While it retains an eerie echo of usability, don’t be fooled: it vanishes under scrutiny, giving way to a sense of deep despair…Īll of the above is a long-winded way of me saying this addled Chromebook is ripe for sacrifice. Background extras on The Walking Dead exhibit more energy than this thing. Using Chrome OS on this Chromebook is painful. Thirdly, and most importantly, is the performance aspect. It was supposed to stop getting Chrome OS updates in June (but this was postponed for a year). We’re talking ‘cob-webbed and comatose’ old. Which brings me to my second point: this is an old Chromebook.
Side-note: Google has made it possible to run Linux apps on Chromebooks but these use a separate OS container and the feature is not supported on older models. You can’t install alternative desktop environments or other web browsers or any other sort of ‘traditional’ app directly. This zombie-slow Chromebook is ripe for sacrifice – and I’m happy to be the one doing it!įirstly, Chrome OS doesn’t work like a regular Linux distro. I’ll get to what Gallium OS is in a bit, but first I need to answer the question you’re probably thinking in your head: “Chromebooks run Chrome OS. Thankfully I didn’t need any spare body parts or a maniacal god complex for my resurrection, just a few choice terminal commands and an Ubuntu-based Linux distro called Gallium OS. Alright, I’m not exactly Dr Frankenstein, but I did exhume the corpse of a forgotten Chromebook from its eternal resting place (my bookcase) to enact a macabre ritual.