Funtoo Linux Installation on Chromebook Pixel 2015

Introduction

This article is a collection of thoughts, knowledge and procedures discovered while installing Funtoo linux on the Google Chromebook Pixel 2015. It is aimed to provide a concise explanation as well as a walkthrough of the components and steps required. However it will not go into the details of the applications or technologies, leaving that to external documentation.

   Note

This is an ongoing effort, e.g Under Construction

   Note

While installing this machine I first wanted to just wipe everything and install Funtoo, but decided to dual boot at first to see how it behaves, identify possible optimizations etc., before wiping the rest of the ChromeOS installation. That being said, it might be worth noting that I did remove the firmware protection and set the flags as described in #Setting seaBIOS as default boot option before setting out on actually installing anything. So verification of certain parts of this article is required.

   Important

Do anything described here or in the linked articles at your own risk, you may damage or otherwise make your device unusable and might need to contact Google for support. Be sure to read this article and all linked articles carefully, and only proceed to do something when you are sure you know what it does.

Developer Mode

Putting the Chromebook in developer mode is a requirement. Also get accustomed to opening the shell and gaining root privileges. Note that changes to ChromeOS's root filesystem are not required for this, so no need to disable root filesystem verification.

Crouton

It was suggested that crouton is a viable alternative to installing a separate Linux distribution. The advantage is that it's simple and requires no partitioning. The downside are that your are limited in distribution choice.

Dual Booting vs. Funtoo only

There are some differences in how to install the system for either dual booting with ChromeOS or removing it. Most notably, it is reported that if the "Signed boot verification" is enabled and ChromeOS is replaced with a different system, "...then your system might become corrupted on empty battery, resetting dev_boot_usb dev_boot_legacy to their default values, forcing you to recover Chrome OS..."[ Arch linux wiki ].

To avoid this, you can either Dual Boot or #Setting seaBIOS as default boot option and install Funtoo only. Another way would be to extract the kernel from ChromeOS and use that.

   Note

I already disabled "Signed boot verification", so someone needs to try this without touching the firmware to confirm that dual boot works with unsigned kernels.

Preparing for Installation

To prepare an additional or alternative operating system we will need to do some common setup, like enabling usb and legacy boot and preparing the installation media, but it is also highly recommended to make a full #Backup of the system before beginning .

Enabling USB boot

To enable usb boot run the following on ChromeOS as root:

root # crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_legacy=1

Setting seaBIOS as default boot option

   Note

This step is only required for removing ChromeOS and installing funtoo on the whole drive.

   Warning

This may damage your system, do at your own risk. You have been warned.