Partition LayoutĬhromebooks require a very specific partition layout any changes to this (and I mean any, as we’ll see) will cause Chrome OS to fail to boot with a “Chrome OS is missing or damaged” error. I don’t think anyone has done a deep dive on this yet, but I’m reasonably confident that their internals are extremely similar. It seems that these models are almost identical (though, I much prefer the external design of the new one), to the point that they share the “Celes” codename, and it seems that this revision is so new and so minor that Samsung hasn’t bothered to put it on its website. If you mess up, you’re going to need an 8 GB flash drive on hand for the recovery image.Ī word about my device in particular: the reason I have provided an Amazon link above is that it seems like my model is a recent, minor design refresh to the Samsung Chromebook 3 XE500C13-K02US. Finally, you’re going to have a flash drive that’s at least 2 GB large for elementary OS. With some luck, and possibly some small changes, you might be to make this work with other Intel-based Chromebooks or Linux distributions.
#INSTALL ELEMENTARY OS ON CHROMEBOOK INSTALL#
If you follow this guide exactly, you should end up with a Chromebook that boots Chrome OS with a 5 GB “user state” partition (at the time of writing sufficient to fit Chrome OS, a very lightly used Android runtime and Linux container with a gigabyte or two left over) and an elementary OS install with a ~20 GB / partition and a 500 MB /boot partition (which ends up about a third full after the install). I’ll try to document places where I had to “experiment” or piece together things to work the way I wanted it to. I can’t be certain that this will work on your device, especially if your configuration deviates from mine, but hopefully it can still be useful in some part. To aid those from the internet who might stumble across this post, I’m going to lay out the goal of this process explicitly: this post goes through the process of installing elementary OS 5.0 “Juno” alongside Chrome OS on the internal storage of my Chromebook, a Samsung Chromebook 3 “Celes” XE501C13-K02US (with a “Braswell” Intel Dual-Core Celeron N3060 processor, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, and 32 GB of eMMC storage). With a bit of effort, I’ve managed to get this to work pretty well to save others (and myself, if I end up having to redo this later!) time I felt like it might be useful to document my installation process here. What is more interesting, however, is that Chromebooks allow for disabling verified boot: while Chrome OS is itself Linux-based, with this validation disabled we can also install a full-blown, “standard” Linux distribution on the device. Considering that it’s pretty easy to find them for under $200, they seemed like a good deal, especially taking into account the new features that Chrome OS has been adding (namely, the ability to install Android apps and run Linux in an container via Crostini). You will have to replace the package_name term with the browser’s package name in the above command.I recently decided to purchase a Chromebook. Execute the following command line to install the preferred browser package: sudo apt install package_name.Launch the Terminal Command using Ctrl + Alt+ T shortcut keys.Here are the steps to install the Linux based browser on Chromebook using the command line: And CLI could well expand to the Debian environment running on your Chrome OS as well. The second approach towards installing applications in Linux is via the sudo-apt command-line interface. That’s it-Microsoft Edge Linux-based browsers on your Chromebook using their Debian setup file. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the browser.Double-click on the downloaded file to launch the setup.