A long time Mint Cinnamon and Kubuntu user, I’ve just started playing about with Endeavor. And the arena I’ve chosen is a stellar one to prove how versatile both Linux and Endeavor itself prove to be. After modding a 2015-era Acer C740 Chromebook with the fascinating captain / mrchromebox instructions and patches, I had myself a 4g ram, 16g ssd sata drive machine ready to put linux on. That’s not much space. I chose the minimal Endeavor install and it took roughly half the space, leaving me around 8g which shrank after using my browser some to around 5 or 6. I spent around $8 on ebay to buy a huge (haha) 64g ssd sata and reinstalled onto it. As a cheap rig I can haul to the coffee shop or on vacation and not feel quite as bad if something happens to it, this is a gem. I’m really happy with the speed so far, though it isn’t going to rival a Ryzen or anything.
But here’s where things have really gotten interesting. I work at Cornerstone Community Outreach, a set of homeless shelters on Chicago’s north side. I serve as one of a couple computer geeks for 'em over there. And I noticed a box of donated Asus Chromebooks they’d gotten. It was sitting collecting dust, since the version of ChromeOS on 'em is outdated and won’t (thanks Google!) update any further.
Last night, I went through six of these. The bad news first… the key moment in the process is flashing that custom rom that allows installing linux. The fascinatingcaptain guy’s the author of it, I believe. Anyway, two of the machines borked on me. I have two bricks. Considering that I also have four nicely working Linux machines, I call it an overall win. Just warning folks this isn’t without risk.
Anyway, great OS… I know very little about Arch itself, so that’s another adventure to pursue.
This is great, I gotta admit I know nothing about chromebooks but I like the idea of a beater laptop you can take anywhere and not be too upset if something happens to it. I wonder if they are really bricked or if there’s a way to revive them. I first used endeavour on an hp stream which is not a chromebook but similarly specced (4 gb ram, and celeron n4000 cpu). I found that it’s perfectly usable if you’re patient, just not very snappy. I even upgraded it to 8 gb ram but that celeron cpu is just not up to snuff these days, for example rendering a complex webpage took a long time.
My wife has an Intel 10th gen Lenovo Chromebook something with a touchscreen that I should try putting Linux on once Google stops supporting it. Lenovo has online instructions of how to do so if I remember correctly.
I hate it when perfectly good hardware gets sent to e-waste. My i7 Haswell XPS 8700 with an NVIDIA GTX1060 will need converting to EOS after I start running into issues with Win10 after all support ends some time after Oct 2025.
There is also a community at https://forum.chrultrabook.com/ On a search, someone thought they bricked their Asus C740 but there are some unbricking instructions.
And I did six more of these, this time with none lost. All running linux happily and hopefully now useful to folks at the shelter. Total of 10 good ones that makes.
I did save chromeos from one of the laptops onto a usb (this option is given you using the mrchromebox script). But when the machine simply doesn’t boot up all the way… the usb isn’t any good. What the script does is flashes a new rom onto it (if I’m understanding correctly). If for some reason that operation fails midstream, it is kinda like an astronaut doing a space walk and her cable snaps and off she floats. There’s no way back… unless there is and I don’t know about it yet.
