I just picked up a C740 on the cheap side. I want to install Gallium and I have been surfing on how to do it. Looks like chrx would be a good way for me to go, dual boot. I have installed Linux on Thinkpads and Dells for a few years now, but never a Chromebook. Just asking if anyone recently install GaOS or would anyone have any advise before moving forward? TIA.
Posted Mar 4, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC
Done it with a few C740 boxes, it's easy and fully compatible with just about anything.
The limit of disk means that dual booting isn't that great as each OS gets limited fairly quickly and start complaining of lack of free space though, so I'd suggest just using Gallium.
Use https://mrchromebox.tech/ and replace the default bios with it for a better experience if you're not using chromeos.
I've got a C738T on the way, found one on the cheap on Amazon after finding it on the HW compatibility list, 4GB of memory to work with, is XFCE pretty performant with Gallium, or should I look for a different desktop environment, would you happen to have any recommendations?
I have a PAINE myself, it's a good little machine, CPU's not great but gets the job done for simple "everyday carry" type of tasks. I've got the 4 GB RAM model which I think is a worthy investment if you can find one.
As for running GalliumOS, it's supported well. If you don't plan on continuing to use ChromeOS on a day-to-day basis, I wouldn't use chrx though. If you're comfortable taking the back off real quick and removing a write protect screw, you should flash full UEFI firmware (from https://mrchromebox.tech/) and then install GalliumOS from our iso afterwards. If you don't want to remove the WP screw, you can still use mrchromebox's script to update the RW_LEGACY firmware and install GalliumOS from our iso that way, overwriting ChromeOS. This way you don't have ChromeOS taking up about half of your SSD when you don't even use it.
The C740 also has a removable SSD, so if you want (and you decide it's worth the money) you can buy a relatively inexpensive 2242 M.2 SATA bus SSD from Amazon and upgrade your storage. I put a 120 GB SSD in mine and I must say it's nice to have the extra breathing room. If you're taking the back off your machine to upgrade the SSD, it's also the perfect opportunity to pop out that write protect screw. ;)
Finally, I believe it's worth noting that these Broadwell family Chromebooks happen to have very good upstream Linux support, so if Xfce isn't really your jam or you prefer another Linux distribution, you should be able to run that no problem. I run Manjaro on mine.
Thanks for the info. How about the top row keys? I suppose they will revert back to function keys? TIA.
If you run some other distro? Yeah. There are a few ways you can remap them. I use a custom PKGBUILD for galliumos-xkeyboard-config (which I just tweaked from the one on the AUR), so you can use that if you're on something Arch-ish. If you're on something Debian-ish you can just download xkb-data from our repository and install it with dpkg.
ISO Install - GalliumOS 3.1 - Asus C300 Baytrail QUAWKS, few days ago.
In my case ChromeOS was no more supported and Android apps were not available, therefore dual booting was not sensible.
I had a couple of minor glitches on sound system I was able to work around.
I installed Skype, Chrome and Libreoffice 6.4 (snap), all of them working fine.
I tried Anbox for installing Android apps: it was too slow for real use, I removed it.