Hello, some time ago I bought a THINKPAD C13 chromebook(AMD Ryzen 5 3500C - 8gb) (MORPHIUS) to install linux. However after trying chrome OS for a while I found out it’s very useful for me the ability to run android apps.
So now I want to try dual booting. After a lot of reading, I turned on developer mode and successfully installed Legacy Firmware following the instructions.
But I wasn’t able to boot from a bootable USB to install some distro.
I always used debian based distros, I use MX linux for quite a long time and it’s fine for me, so I burned a USB through MX OS choosing latest ahs option (with 6.6 kernel) because I think I read somewhere 6.1 is not supported.
The welcome menu opens but it doesn’t boot.
Then I tried burning USB with Rufus on windows and choosing mbr instead of GPT (not sure if it’s enough for legacy compatibility though)
I had the same result, not booting.
Am I missing something? Is the distro incompatible or what?
Is it a GRUB problem?
Do I have to enable somehow(?) iommu=pt boot parameter?
Also I’m confused, am I supposed to do the partitioning through the distro installation as usual or somehow before, because I understand it’s not safe to mess with partitions in chrome OS.
Is Gparted supposed to work in crostini ?(it didn’t for me)
Any other distro proposal for dual booting?
I forgot to mention I upgraded the SSD to 512 GB
Thanks in advance!
- I have had more luck with UEFI than the RW Legacy firmware on this machine for running Linux, but I have only run Fedora, Debian, openSUSE and Submarine.
- My knowledge may be limited here, but I do believe it may be difficult to dual-boot ChromeOS and Linux since ChromeOS has so many different partitions and quite the complex setup to make the stateless updates work flawlessly, you may be better off just installing Linux
yeah… I think homeboy would be better off just corebooting it… I have a C13 with the same CPU and RAM config as OP, so I can confirm it not only works out of the box with the Gentoo Live USB, but you don’t need to add iommu=pt to the boot parameters, can confirm since I’ve been daily driving mine. That being said I have no experience with RW_Legacy, so I can’t say anything about that other than UEFI might be better.
Agreed, but I don’t think they’re watching their email for forum replies anymore lol
No my friend, I’m watching! 
And I want to thank both of you for your answers!
It’s true I was hopping for more help on the dual booting thing, but most of the documentation here and else where is for UEFI.
I tried a couple of times installing MX linux with no luck and there was a time I had some issues leaving me with no time to spend on this.
Then I decided to give ultramarine linux a try, but posts like this gave me only doubts about the proccess
Anyway, just yesterday I decided to go ahead and install it as usual, ignoring the above and Voilà!, everything is working just fine. So I’m happy for now, I’ll have to get used with the packet manager and different commands, but no problem. I was more surprised to see the Gparted was missisng from the live usb, which is a must for me.
I’m trying to get keyd to work now, to remap my keys, but I’m having trouble with nemo gaining root access…?
Any help on that would be nice, other than this everything seems to work fine!
Thank you again!
edit: OK, I did the key remaping, no problems for now.
I 'm wondering if it’s possible to access my files in Chrome OS, but I quess the file system is locked…