About the Chromebooks Developer Cookbook

This cookbook is a collection of useful scripts and information to create Debian-based images with the latest kernel that can be flashed on different Chromebook models.

The documentation, like the chromebook developer tool itself, is very much a work in progress. Please note that improvements to the documentation are welcome; create a github account and fork the project if you want to help out.

The latest version of the ‘Chromebooks Developer Cookbook’ can be found here:

Chromebook developer tool

These instructions will create a dual-booting environment where you can switch between booting Debian and the stock ChromeOS. No changes are made to the internal eMMC drive, and your new Debian install will run completely from external storage. This is the recommended setup for those that just want to take a test drive, or don’t want to give up ChromeOS.

You must be running the latest ChromeOS prior to installation.

Switch to developer mode

  1. Turn off the laptop.
  2. To invoke Recovery mode, you hold down the ESC and Refresh keys and poke the Power button.
  3. At the Recovery screen press Ctrl-D (there’s no prompt - you have to know to do it).
  4. Confirm switching to developer mode by pressing enter, and the laptop will reboot and reset the system. This takes about 10-15 minutes.

Note: After enabling developer mode, you will need to press Ctrl-D each time you boot, or wait 30 seconds to continue booting.

Enable booting from external storage

  1. After booting into developer mode, hold Ctrl and Alt and poke the F2 key. This will open up the developer console.
  2. Type root to the login screen.
  3. Then type this to enable USB booting:
enable_dev_usb_boot
  1. Reboot the system to allow the change to take effect.

Create a USB or SD for dual booting

./chromebook-setup.sh help

Examples:

  1. Create a bootable media for supported aarch64 Chromebooks using a Fedora Workstation Rawhide image and install a minimal custom build of the kernel in the image.
./chromebook-setup.sh do_everything --architecture=arm64 --storage=/dev/[sdX|mmcblkX]
  1. Create a bootable media for supported aarch64 Chromebooks using Fedora Workstation 38
tools/image-installer/fedora-workstation-38-aarch64 /dev/[sdX|mmcblkX]

Under the hood, this script downloads an uncompress a Fedora-Workstation-38-1.6 image and runs:

./chromebook-setup.sh deploy_fedora --architecture=arm64 --storage=/dev/[sdX|mmcblkX] --distro=fedora \
      --image=Fedora-Workstation-38-1.6.aarch64.raw \
      --kparams="clk_ignore_unused deferred_probe_timeout=30