I have an old HP Chromebook 13 G1 (Intel Core m7-6Y75, with 16GB RAM), that I’m trying to salvage.
It’s currently running ChromeOS - however, the device is EOL, and many sites don’t seem to work. Also - I’m not sure if it’s due to the old ChromeOS version (and bugs), or memory pressure or something - but the machine is very laggy, and the Chrome browser frequently seems to need to restart (and then I get a prompt to restore my tabs).
Searching around - it seems like a lot of people installing Linux on this machine (or other Intel Skylake chromebooks) had issues with audio - but the MrChromeBox FAQ’s linked to this page:
which seems to have that fix.
However, my question is what distro to use on this machine?
Gallium Linux is no longer a thing.
I see some people talk about putting ChromeOS Flex on this machine (but I’m not sure if the audio workaround above will work on that?)
Or are there other Linux distros that people would suggest here, for a low-powered machine like this? (I normally use Debian for most of my Linux boxes - would installing vanilla Debian work well here? And then I just pick the DE I want on top of that? I wonder how Gnome would run here…)
I’ve done a quick write-up of my Linux install on the HP Chromebook 13 G1, in case it helps anybody else (and also in case anybody has tips on the non-working stuff, or things I could do better).
UEFI Firmware Install
This official video from HP helpfully shows how to take the bottom case off the HP Chromebook 13 G1. Basically, there’s 3 screws down the left/right side of the case - then 3 under the top rubber strip, and 2 under the bottom rubber strip.
This blog post shows where the WP (write protect) screw is - which I removed and put aside for now. (I assume there’s no need to put it back?)
I then ran the MrChromebox scripts, to install the UEFI firmware.
Debian Installation
I was able to install Debian Sid on the HP Chromebook 13 G1, using the Debian netinstall weekly CD images. One small gotcha - the trackpad didn’t seem to work during the Debian graphical installer (although it worked fine subsequently when it booted up into the new install) - so I had to use the keyboard to navigate around.
The Debian installer allows you to connect to wifi out of the box - which was really hand (and saved me having to find a USB-C to Ethernet dongle).
For the Debian package selection screen, I enabled both XFCE and LXQT so I could try both. (LXQT seems to have more frequent releases - but I did find XFCE more polished - or possibly it’s more “macOS” like in terms of where things are, so I’m simply more used t it. I did use XFCE before a long time ago. I might play around more with LXQT later though.
For the display manager (i.e. login screen), I chose SDDM (although I assume LightDM would have worked fine).
XFCE Setup
When I booted up, I tried the default “Xfce Session (Wayland)” login - however, that just seemed to hang, and I had to force-reboot the Chromebook.
However, the “Xfce Session”, and “LXQT Desktop” option both worked fine - I assume perhaps they’re using X, and not Wayland? Might need to debug that more later - if anybody has any tips here, let me know.
On first boot into XFCE, the resolution was set by default to 3200x1800 - and the text and on-screen elements were tiny. In XFCE, I went into Settings, Display, and tried setting the resolution to 1600x900 - which did help - but apparently that’s not the right way to do things…haha. I set the resolution back to 3200x1800, and set Scale to 2.0.
I also went into Settings, Mouse and Touchpad, and enabled “Tap touchpad to click”, and increased the Pointer Speed Acceleration. To be honest, it doesn’t quite feel as polished as say, the macOS trackpad but it’s not terrible. (I’m sure there’s some Linux trackpad tweaks I could do here - let me know if anybody has any suggestions. Apparently this Chromebook uses an “Elan” brand trackpad.)
However, the display and trackpad tweaks only apply within XFCE - the login screen (SDDM) doesn’t respect this, and you’re back to really tiny text. I’m sure there’s some X or SDDM tweaks I need to do there.
NFS
I had to install nfs-common, to be able to mount NFS mounts successfully. (nfs-utils was already installed, I think - which was weird).
Battery
In the XFCE system tray at the top, I added the “Power Manager Plugin”, so that I could get my battery percentage, and also use that to change the display brightness as needed. (The normal Chromebook top row keys seemed to have reverted to standard F1-F12 keys).
Battery drain does appear to be quite high (I can literally see the battery percentage ticking down in the top right, even when I just have Chrome Browser open, with about 10 tabs, and I’m not actively using the machine…lol)
I installed the following packages from the Debian repos:
firmware-linux
firmware-linux-nonfree
firmware-linux-free
firmware-intel-sound
To be honest, I’m not sure which of them are required just for sound - if anybody knows categorically, let me know.
I also ran the setup-audio script from the chromebook-linux-audio repo - however, it gave me an error message about missing audio modules. (I filed this issue to dig into that).
If you need to run their debug script - you’ll also need to install the pipewire-bin and strace packages.
There’s also the fairly scary warning about:
Using AVS on a device with max98357a will blow your speakers. You have been warned.
I believe the HP Chromebook 13 G1 uses this audio chipset - from some Googling, it seems to be something to do with the audio limiter - and keeping the speaker volume low might work? I haven’t actually heard the speakers work yet though - and I’m scared to tinker too much here.
I did plug in some 3.5mm headphones, and it seems to work with those (although sometimes it seems to glitch out, and I need to unplug/replug the headphones - which I didn’t seem to need to do before, when I was on stock ChromeOS. However, I haven’t investigated this further).