Hi, I’ve been messing with the chromebook (SNOW) as said in the title, trying to get PostmarketOS and/or Arch Linux ARM to boot on the chromebook.
Some important notes you might need to know:
- Used Raspberry Pi Imager and Etcher to write images, and yes, I’ve tested both to achieve the same result. In cases where I need to modify partitions and such (Arch Linux ARM), I use dd.
- I have also tried the images and methods from this github repo:
- GitHub - hexdump0815/linux-mainline-on-arm-chromebooks: running linux mainline on arm chromebooks - for example: samsung xe303c12 and xe503c12 (snow and peach), acer c100, c101 and c201 (veyron speedy, minnie etc. and gru bob and kevin), medion s2013 and s2015 (veyron jaq, mighty etc.), acer cb5 311 (nyan big), lenovo n23, acer r13 (oak elm and hana), lenovo duet (kukui krane) and most probably many many more over time ...
- though most of what I have done is what has been described in the PostmarketOS and Arch Linux ARM docs.
- Write protect is disabled, and developer mode is on. I have tested this by flashing an empty bin file (or something in that regard) to make the developer mode screen change to a black screen with the words ‘developer mode warning’.
- Stuff like Crouton seems to run fine on the chromebook, obviously outdated but still.
- I’ve used a couple of older SD cards for the images. Haven’t used any newer SD cards
- This isn’t really mission critical, I kind just want to see if I can get some sort of Linux system running on it to mess with and potentially add this to a small mesh or cluster.
I’ve looked at the resources described above, and what it seems to boil down to is to get the chromebook into developer mode, enabling usb boot and stuff with crossystem, optionally setting GBB flags, and then using CTRL+U to boot to the usb as stuff like legacy boot doesn’t seem to be supported on the ARM-based chromebooks in question, at least from what I’ve read and seen.
Is there any details I’ve missed? Regardless of which images I’ve used they all seem to result in the screen going black for a second or two, then beeping. I’ve been stuck at this step for a minute and I need some insight on what I could possibly do here. Thank you!