Re: Debian on Lenovo Chromebook (ARMv8)
On 30/03/2023 23:38, Thomas Uwe Grüttmüller wrote:
> I recently bought a Chromebook with the intent to delete Chrome and
> install Debian. I’m not talking about running Debian in a virtual
> machine or chroot environment under ChromeOS, but booting directly into
> it. The laptop is a
> Lenovo IdeaPad Flex3 CB 11M735,
> and its processor is a
> MediaTek MT8173C (4 core ARMv8).
Unfortunately, support for MediaTek SoCs is not enabled in the Debian
arm64 kernel builds yet (not even CONFIG_ARCH_MEDIATEK). So a vanilla
Debian installation is not going to work regardless of the ChromeOS
bootloader stuff.
I've been looking into what changes we can appropriate from their kernel
configuration to support more chromebooks, but I'm not a kernel expert
and I fear the changes might be too big and too late for bookworm.
On 31/03/2023 00:50, Brian Sammon wrote:
>> I currently have a Lenovo Duet 5 chromebook (with ARM processor) that runs
>> debian off an SD Card via USB.
The SC7180 one? Does it work with the Debian-built kernel?
>>> The problem is that instead of a normal BIOS or UEFI, thelaptop has the
>>> nasty ChromeOS bootloader which refuses to boot the normal Debian ARM64
>>> Netinst installer. The only thing it wants to boot from USB is the
>>> ChromeOS recovery.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> I haven't gotten to the point of understanding if/why all these steps are
>> actually necessary, but I've used this process successfully to customize
>> the install and partition table on the SD card I'm using on my Chromebook.
>> I suspect that a similar process could be applied to the internal storage
>> of a Chromebook, but I haven't explored that yet.
It's just how Google designed their bootloader to boot ChromeOS, instead
of using UEFI... What those steps do is to package Debian's files their
way, so that the bootloader will find and boot them as if it's booting
ChromeOS. Works on the internal eMMC and on a USB drive as well.
I've automated the entire thing in depthcharge-tools (as Jérémy
mentioned). So if you did the partitioning and have a working kernel,
running e.g. `sudo depthchargectl write` would handle the rest.
On 31/03/2023 11:14, Jérémy Lal wrote:
> Alper Nebi Yasak was working on making it easier to do all that in debian,
> you might find interesting things at https://salsa.debian.org/alpernebbi
> I know depthcharge-tools is in debian and is working (i'm using it on c201
> chromebooks).
> However I don't know if it's possible to install debian the usual way right
> now.
Debian Installer can create ChromeOS kernel partitions (manually) and
can use depthcharge-tools to make things bootable now, assuming you can
get the installer to boot (wrt/ kernel support, manual image
preparation, size limits).
I need to work more on generating pre-built installer images, and I
expect I'll need to write a wiki page for some parts eventually. But
things are looking good (kernel config aside).
Reply to: