Tag Archives: Chromebook Pixel

CLI, Hardware, OS

Install Linux on Chromebook Pixel 2 (Samus)

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I’ve run crouton on my Chromebook Pixel 2  (2015, codename Samus) for some time now but I’ve found myself wanting more. Virtualbox, kernel access, graphics, and more don’t perform well in a chroot. Thankfully it’s actually pretty easy to dual boot Chrome OS and Linux on your chromebook thanks to chrx (pronounced “marshmallow”?)

Installation

The first part of installation is identical to setting up crouton:

  • Enter developer mode:
    Press ESC, Refresh, power simultaneously (when the chromebook is on)

    • Every time you power on the chromebook from now on you’ll get a scary screen. Press CTRL-D to bypass it (or wait 30 seconds)
    • If you hit space on this screen instead of CTRL+D it will powerwash (nuke) your data
      A scary screen will pop up saying the OS is missing or damaged. Press CTRL D, then press Enter when the OS verification screen comes up.
  • Wait several minutes for developer mode to be installed. Note it will wipe your device to do this.

Enable SeaBIOS:

Open up a shell (CTRL + ALT + T, shell, enter) and enter the following

sudo crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_legacy=1

and reboot.

Next, download and run the chrx script twice. The first run will partition and powerwash your system; the second run will actually install GalliumOS (or Ubuntu or Fedora) alongside ChromeOS.

cd ; curl -Os https://chrx.org/go && sudo sh go

reboot after partition, run shell again. You can specify a number of arguments to the go script; I wanted to use Cinnamon on Fedora so these are the ones I used:

cd ; curl -Os https://chrx.org/go && sudo sh go -d fedora -e cinnamon -r latest -H <hostname> -U <username> -Z <timezone>

Fedora took quite a long time to install (1 hour in my case.) Just let the script do its thing. Once complete you can reboot and press CTRL + D for chromeOS or CTRL + L for Linux.

After that, reboot into your new linux environment!

Cleaning up

There were a few samus-specific things I needed to do.

Locale

For some reason my locale was set to an African country.  Correct by doing this:  (thanks to here) I added SELinux commands because for some reason I was getting permission denied errors.

sudo setenforce 0
localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.utf8
sudo setenforce 1

Audio doesn’t work (no sound)

This issue stems from the fact that the sound card is not presented as the first available card. The system defaults to HDMI sound instead. Fortunately this page has instructions on how to fix this. If you’re running GalliumOS default you can follow the instructions from the link above. In my case I had to get a bit creative.

  1. Download the samus patches from here
    wget https://github.com/GalliumOS/galliumos-samus/archive/master.zip
  2. Extract subfolders inside said zip file to root directory
  3. Reboot
  4. run the following: 
    1. cp -r /etc/skel/.config $HOME
sudo samus-alsaenable-speakers
sudo samus-touch-reset

Success! You can now dual boot between Full blown Linux and ChromeOS on your Chromebook Pixel.

Touchpad / touchscreen stop working after resume

Occasionally my touchpad and touchscreen stop responding after resuming from sleep. The galliumOS-samus fix mentioned above has a handy reset script that fixes this. Simply run:

sudo samus-touch-reset

and your touch functionality is restored. I bound this command to a key shortcut to make things easier.

Virtualbox won’t start

After installing virtualbox I got a strange error message when trying to start VMs:

Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_SUPLIB_OWNER_NOT_ROOT)

I found this mention saying that /usr has to be owned by root. Easy enough of a fix:

sudo chown root:root /usr/
OS

Install Cinnamon on a Wily chromebook chroot

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I recently installed Ubuntu Wily Werewolf 15.10 as a chroot on my Chromebook Pixel 2. The process wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be so I will document it here.

First, I followed my own guide on how to set up a crouton chroot. The install would not complete – it was complaining about gnome-session-manager. I had to install the chroot with no GUI. This is the command I used (I specify a specific mirror to use because it’s much faster)

sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -r wily -t touch,extension,keyboard,cli-extra -e -n cinnamon -m http://mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu

Once the initial chroot was set up, I installed cinnamon:

sudo apt-get install cinnamon-desktop-environment

After all that was installed, I followed my own guide on configuring cinnamon. I placed the following script in /usr/local/bin/startcinnamon on my chromebook (not the chroot)

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a Mint session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "$0"`/enter-chroot" "$@" xinit

And I placed this file within the chroot, in my home directory:

echo "exec cinnamon-session" > ~/.xinitrc

I started by issuing the command

sudo startcinnamon

I noticed things didn’t look quite right. It turned out I was missing some icons.  Fix this by installing them:

sudo apt-get install gnome-icon-theme-full

I then discovered gnome-terminal wouldn’t run – it would simply crash on exit error 8. I discovered that it was due to missing locale settings. The fix was found here, which involves installing the gnome language pack and setting your locale.

sudo apt-get install language-pack-gnome-en
sudo update-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US"

To instigate the changes you must exit all chroot instances.

That was it! After that bit of tweaking I have an Ubuntu 15.10 chroot working pretty well on my Chromebook Pixel 2.

 

Networking, OS

Fix openVPN on chromebooks

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Edit: I’ve updated the script due to more updates in ChromeOS. Find the update here.

Around October of 2015 an update came out to Google Chromebooks that had an unfortunate side effect for me: openvpn no longer worked. Despite my having created a tunnel device seconds earlier, openvpn complained that a tunnel device didn’t exist.

I finally found a fix for this here. It turns out that the update caused the “shill” process to aggressively kill the tun0 interface. The clever workaround as posted by pippo0312 works flawlessly. It involves creating the openvpn tunnel in chromium itself rather than in a crouton chroot as I had previously done.

The original script took an argument for an ovpn file to use. Since I only have one VPN profile I just modified it to specify the ovpn file I use.

Place the script in /usr/local/bin on your chrome install (not a chroot) and mark it executable by issuing chmod +x

#!/bin/sh -e
trap '' 2
# Stop shill and restart it with a nicer attitude towards tun0
sudo stop shill
sudo start shill BLACKLISTED_DEVICES=tun0
# Sleep 10 seconds to allow chromebook to reconnect to the network
sudo sleep 10
sudo openvpn --mktun --dev tun0
sudo sleep 3
# Add google DNS on top of current ones, since openvpn command does not do it
sudo sed -i '1s/^/# new DNS\nnameserver 8.8.8.8\nnameserver 8.8.4.4\n# old DNS\n/' /var/run/shill/resolv.conf
# Lauch openvpn, finally...
sudo openvpn --config $1 --dev tun0
# When ctrl-c is hit remove tun0 and cleanup the DNS
sudo openvpn --rmtun --dev tun0
sudo sed -i '/# new DNS/,/# old DNS/d' /var/run/shill/resolv.conf
trap 2

Now you can just issue the command of the name of your script and vpn works again! hooray.

OS, Virtualization

Install Virtualbox on a Chromebook

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I am really enjoying my Chromebook Pixel 2015. Recently I needed to spin up a few VMs on this box. I tried to install virtualbox but it turns out that the kernel for the chromebook does not include virtualbox headers. Fortunately it’s fairly easy to add them, thanks to divx118’s scripts.

First, enable the necessary chromebook kernel flags. Run these commands in a crosh shell (not in a chroot)

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/divx118/crouton-packages/master/change-kernel-flags
sudo sh ~/Downloads/change-kernel-flags

Note: You will need to repeat the above steps after each chromeos update.

Next, open up a chroot shell and do the following:

cd ~
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/divx118/crouton-packages/master/setup-headers.sh
sudo sh setup-headers.sh

Lastly, reboot the chromebook. Once you’re back up, enter your chrooted environment and install Virtualbox from their Oracle’s download page. Don’t use the virtualbox repositories – they don’t work.

Install the downloaded deb file with dpkg

dpkg -i virtualbox-5.0_5.0.10-104061~Ubuntu~trusty_amd64.deb

You might get this error:

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of virtualbox-5.0:
 virtualbox-5.0 depends on libqt4-opengl (>= 4:4.7.2); however:
  Package libqt4-opengl is not installed.

The fix to that error is to run the following command to install missing dependencies:

apt-get -f install

If you get weird errors about VT-X not being enabled in the BIOS, try running the script and rebooting again.

Success!

OS

Install Cinnamon on a Chromebook with Crouton

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I really love using Crouton on my Chromebook Pixel LS 2015. I was sad to see that there is no cinnamon desktop environment target with the latest versions of crouton. Below is what I did to get Cinnamon on my chromebook. Much of what I did was taken from https://gist.github.com/sohjsolwin/5939948

  1. Create a base chroot
  2. Enter your chroot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsvetko.tsvetkov/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

Once Cinnamon was installed I needed to know how to start it manually. Thanks to the Arch Linux forums for explaining it. You have to create a .xinitrc file in your home directory within your chroot.

echo "exec cinnamon-session" > ~/.xinitrc

Trying to manually start cinnamon by typing startx didn’t work – I got a blank screen and had to hard reset to get anything to come back. Thanks to github I learned you need to use xinit instead of startx.

Lastly, we need to create a suitable startcinnamon script.

wget https://gist.github.com/sohjsolwin/5934362/raw/f68fc0942798902a0bd48f40c17dc0cd5cf585ea/startcinnamon

Modify the file to remove the startx command with xinit. Also remove everything after xinit. My file is as follows:

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a Mint session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "$0"`/enter-chroot" "$@" xinit

Make this file executable (chmod +x startcinnamon) and move it to the /usr/local/bin directory of your chromebook (not your chroot.) Now all you need to do is enter

sudo startcinnamon

and your cinnamon desktop should come up!

 

Update 2016-01-04

These two scripts seem to work a little bit better. Place this one within your chroot under /usr/local/bin/startcinnamon:

#!/bin/sh -e
# Copyright (c) 2015 The crouton Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

# Launches GNOME; automatically falls back to gnome-panel

exec crouton-noroot gnome-session-wrapper cinnamon

Place this one in /usr/local/bin outside your chroot (on your chromebook itself.)

#!/bin/sh -e
# Copyright (c) 2015 The crouton Authors. All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
# found in the LICENSE file.

set -e

APPLICATION="${0##*/}"

USAGE="$APPLICATION [options]

Wraps enter-chroot to start a GNOME session.
By default, it will log into the primary user on the first chroot found.

Options are directly passed to enter-chroot; run enter-chroot to list them."

exec sh -e "`dirname "\`readlink -f "$0"\`"`/enter-chroot" -t cinnamon "$@" "" \
    exec startcinnamon
CLI, Hardware, OS

Install Ubuntu chroot on your Chromebook

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I recently got a Chromebook Pixel 2015 LS. It is a very nice device. Chromium OS is great but a power user like myself wants a little more functionality out of this beautiful machine.

Fortunately it’s not too difficult to get an Ubuntu chroot running side by side with chromium. The Google developers have made a script to automate the process.

Below is my experience installing an Ubuntu Trusty chroot on my chromebook 2015 LS.

Prepwork

  • Enter developer mode:
    Press ESC, Refresh, power simultaneously (when the chromebook is on)

    • Every time you power on the chromebook from now on you’ll get a scary screen. Press CTRL-D to bypass it (or wait 30 seconds)
    • If you hit space on this screen instead of CTRL+D it will powerwash (nuke) your data
      A scary screen will pop up saying the OS is missing or damaged. Press CTRL D, then press Enter when the OS verification screen comes up.
  • Wait several minutes for developer mode to be installed. Note it will wipe your device to do this.

Install Crouton

Now that we’re in developer mode we will use a script called crouton to install an Ubuntu chroot (thanks to lifehacker for the guidance.)

  1. Download Crouton:  https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
  2. Press CTRL ALT T to open terminal
  3. Type ‘shell’ (without quotes) and hit enter
  4. sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -r trusty -t touch,extension,unity-desktop,keyboard,cli-extra -e -n unity
    1. Note the arguments are suited to my needs. You will want to read up on the documentation to decide which options you want, i.e. desktop environment
  5. Install this crouton extension to integrate clipboard (in conjuction with the ‘extension’ parameter above)

General points of interest / lessons learned

  • Don’t enter the chroot and type startx. It will hard freeze your chromebook.
  • You don’t need to blow your chroot away if you want a different desktop environment, simply install desired environment on your existing chroot
  • To switch between chroots pres Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F2 or F3 (back or forward arrows on top row, not to be confused with the arrows on the bottom right of the keyboard)

High DPI

High DPI screens are a pain to deal with. Here are my tweaks:

  • Go to System settings / Displays / Scale for menu and title bars. I like 1.75
  • Alternatively you can change your resolution. If you mess up and X won’t start properly, delete ~/.config/monitors.xml (thanks to askubuntu)
  • Use the setres script to enable other resolutions in the display manager
    • setres 1440 960
  • Firefox fix tiny text:
    • go to about:config and modify layout.css.devPixelsPerPx, set to 2

Other tweaks:

  • Make trackpad match Chrome:
    • System settings / mouse and trackpad / Check “Natural Scrolling”
  • Remove lens suggestions:
    • Install unity-tweak-tool, notify-osd, overlay-scrollbar, unity-webapps-service
    • Run unity-tweak-tool and uncheck “search online sources” from the search tab
  • Move docky bar to the left:
    • sudo apt-get install gconf-editor
    • Press Alt+F2, enter: gconf-editor and in this configuration editor, navigate to “apps -> docky-2 -> Docky -> Interface -> DockPreferences -> Dock1″
    • On the right side there are some properties with their corresponding values, including the position of the dock which you can change from “Bottom” to “Top/Left/Right” to move Docky to the upper part of the desktop.
  • Install Mac OSX theme
  • Install elementary OS chroot

Garbled mouse cursor when switching between chroots

Sometimes the mouse cursor would get all weird when switching between my chroots. The fix is to install the latest Intel drivers within your chroot.

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository https://download.01.org/gfx/ubuntu/14.04/main
wget --no-check-certificate https://download.01.org/gfx/RPM-GPG-KEY-ilg -O - | sudo apt-key add -
wget --no-check-certificate https://download.01.org/gfx/RPM-GPG-KEY-ilg-2 -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

That’s it.. for now 🙂

 

Update 07/27/2015

I discovered that creating chroots was taking a very long time due to the mirror being chosen. I discovered the -m parameter of crouton which allows you to specify a mirror of your choosing. My updated setting is thus:

sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -r trusty -t touch,extension,kde-desktop,keyboard,cli-extra -e -n unitykde -m http://mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu

If you happened to do a CTRL + C to cancel an existing chroot install that was going slowly, you can simply append the -m parameter above along with -u -u to resume with the updated mirror:

sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -r trusty -t touch,extension,kde-desktop,keyboard,cli-extra -e -n unitykde -m http://mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu -u -u