Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Looking for 2nd Gen Chromebook / Chromebox owners to try Ubuntu install

Update: ChrUbuntu works on both the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook and the Samsung Series 3 Chromebox (i5 and Celeron versions). Thanks for all the reports! FYI, I also got a i5 Chromebox at I/O myself and it's crazy how fast it is!

The 2nd Generation Samsung Chromebook and the 1st Chromebox are out! I'm looking for testers to try installing Ubuntu via the script on both of these devices. In theory, it should work but I can't say for certain. Worst case scenario, a USB recovery may be necessary.

It's not clear if these new devices will ship with a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Chrome OS since Chrome OS 19 and 20 were 64-bit but seem to have reverted to 32-bit in later releases. If the 12.04 install process errors out with "you need to be running a 64-bit version..." then try the 11.04 install process if you could.

If you try the install, let us know how it goes in the comments! In other news, I'm aware the 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 installer won't work on Chromebooks any longer since Google reverted to 32-bit builds. I'll see if I can get a 32-bit release out soon.

40 comments:

  1. It is indeed a 64-bit. It should work! Too bad I don't have one!

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  2. Will the Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit installer not work for 32-bit builds? Wow, I though you could have two os's with 32-bit and 64-bit at once. Darn!

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  3. I tried the install. Some things are kinda strange... The trackpad is very wonky (dragging a window is impossible, the movement is not that smooth, and it seemed to think that every click was a right click for a while) and wake from sleep is hit or miss. It seems the longer the notebook is asleep, the less chance it has of waking up. Usually just comes up to a black screen. I removed Chrubuntu and just restored back to Chrome since Chrubuntu was a bit unusable (mainly because of the weird trackpad behavior).

    I'm willing to be a guinea pig. contact me at maxe550c2@gmail.com.

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  4. Guess I should have commented about the install procedure...

    I followed the instructions that you made for installing on the Samsung Series 5 and everything went smooth. The downloads of a few packages seemed to stop half way through, but I just reran the script and it picked up where it left off. OVerall I would say the install is great but the problems I had were with usability once in Ubuntu.

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    1. Blogger is being kinda weird. Both the post from 'Unknown' and 'Mike' are the same person :)

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  5. I tried the installation on a ChromeBox (ships with a 64bit kernel) and everything worked like a charm. I haven't found any problems yet. Thanks for the great work!

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  6. I knew it should work. They made the update cycle for the 2nd-gen 64-bit. But the 1st-gen is still 32-bit.

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  7. Yep works fine on my Samsung 5 Series 550, just reverted back to ChromeOS for now as really want to give it ago first.

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  8. Will your 11.04 install still work on the new Samsungs? It would seem that TouchEgg is not supported in 12.04 at the moment and i'd like to try that out.

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  9. 12.04 working great on the chromebox. However, any chance of getting USB Transceiver working on this build? I think it's missing something in the kernel.

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  10. How do you get in dev mode on the chromebox? There is no instructions for the chromebox

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    1. It's in the Kensington lock (clever, clever!)

      http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-sandy-bridge

      Jay

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    2. I should mention that I have a standard keyboard plugged in to my chromebox. So I am trying ctrl+alt+F2 to get to dev terminal and it is not working

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    3. Are you sure you're in Dev mode? You flipped the switch in the lock device and see the sad face on bootup?

      I did have an issue where I couldn't press space or CTRL+D at the sad face with my USB keyboard but I discovered that was because I had my mouse and keyboard plugged into a port extender.

      Jay

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  11. Just installed this on the Samsung 5 550. Booted up to a large box telling me I had to download stuff in various languages (Flash I think). Clicking ok on it didn't work (had connected wifi), so just closed it.

    The default keyboard map is slightly wrong, eg shift+2 outputs @, when it should be ".

    The trackpad needs work. If you need to click & drag, eg for selectboxes, you need to press down on the trackpad and move your finger while pressing down. Clicking on one part of the trackpad and moving with another finger is interpreted as a right click. 2-finger scrolling is a little bit inconsistent. 3-finger window moving works pretty well.

    Will do more testing, but it's working pretty well. No complaints about 32/64bit. I was on the dev channel.

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  12. I am running into a problem installing it stops at file ubuntu.binbe.bz2 the md5 hash it is expecting is not the one on that file. the install hangs.

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  13. Installed on Chromebox and it worked great. So great that I've decided to upgrade to 16GB RAM and a 120GB OCZ mSATA SSD. Just finished installing the hardware, now I'm going to see if the install script will let me select a 110GB install partition or not. If not...well, it's going to be a long night.

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    1. Were you able to do this? I'd like to do it as well if you had success with the install partition changing.

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    2. Any progress on this? I am interested in doing something similar. 10Gb for ubuntu is not going to cut it for me.

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    3. I believe the hardware is only limited to 2gigs ram, so I don't believe any more than that will be recognized, unfortunately. RE: the harddrive, the 32gig drive i threw in has worked great, but I've needed to tweak the install script for 11.04 to get it allocating more space. just edit out the if/else limit of 5-10 gigs with Vim.

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  14. Successful installed on the new Chromebox (given at Google IO 2012). At the first reboot Wifi didn't work, but it's OK at the second. Thank Jay for the great work.

    Is anybody know how to install Windows on Chromebox?

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  15. Where can I find the script? Love to try it out on my chromebox I got at I/O 2012.

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    1. http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html

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  16. I was unable to install lirc for my mce remote due to 'missing kernel modules', probably unrelated to Chrubuntu, but thought I'd mention it anyway.

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  17. I have a chromebox earned at Google I/O, I can test if you want.

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    1. Just followed http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com.br/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html and worked.

      Looks good so far.

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  18. Any notes on how to go about inserting lets say a 2.5" ssd for a headless ubuntu server?

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  19. Installed it on my i5 Chromebox from I/O and it worked like a charm. The only issue that I have is that it won't recognize my USB speakers (Logitech Z-10) or my USB sound card (M-Audio Fast Track II). Seems like the snd-usb-audio module is missing.

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  20. Works great on my 2nd Gen Samsung Chromebook. Boots very quickly into ChrUbuntu. Just need to remember to type CTRL + d at sick-face screen or get some really LOUD beeps. Thank you very much. This is great!

    Wondering how to boot to Chromeos now???

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  21. I try to boot ubuntu on chromebox series 3, but with no luck. I see with parted, that the ext4 partition is partition 7. I change cgpt add -i 6 -P 5 -S 1 /dev/sda to cgpt add -i 6 -P 7 -S 1 /dev/sda but still no boot in ubuntu. Any idea?

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  22. Ok, i found the sollution, I had to run this command after installation, for succesfull boot in ubuntu: /usr/share/vboot/bin/make_dev_ssd.sh --remove_rootfs_verification
    I dont know what it does, but it works.

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  23. When will the 32-bit release come out for Samsung Chromebooks finally?

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  24. I meant the 12.04/32-bit script!?

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  25. works ok on my series 5 550. The trackpad needs work though

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  26. Installed on my Chromebox and works great so far. Any way to keep the kernel up to date though? I noticed it is newer than the one in the Ubuntu repos, but would love to have a process to keep it fresh.

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  27. @Paul Bailey - which install instructions did you follow? I'm trying to install on chromebox (I/O version) and afater install procedure it goes to a blank screen. I previously installed on my first chromebox, which works fine, but on this second one, I tried the kxf3n script on Jay Lee's page (http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html) and also the hnkxo script on http://williammcewan.blogspot.com/2012/07/installing-ubuntu-on-chromebook.html. They both end by going to a blank screen after reboot. I have to force power off, then repower takes me to chromeos.

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    1. I used the directions at http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html but it looks like he changed the script since I did it.

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  28. I did this on my acer c7,and I shut it off and turbed it back on and bnow it shows a blank screen

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