Recently I came into possession of a mostly functional Samsung Chromebook Plus (kevin) which uses a Rockchip RK3399 ARM CPU.

I have messed around with Linux on Chromebooks before. In early high school I used Crouton on a cheap x86 Acer Chromebook and more recently I have used MrChromebox.tech’s Firmware script to install Coreboot UEFI on a cheap x86 Lenovo Chromebook which enables the installation of most normal desktop Linux distros on Chromebooks (I ended up installing Xubuntu) none of these shenanigans have felt particularly worth documenting. They are fairly widely know and are covered by comprehensive guides and documentation from the people who actually created these tools

But Linux on ARM Chromebooks is a little bit stranger. Of course I am still standing on the shoulders of people much smarter then myself who actually did the work of creating these distributions and writing documentation for them, but the documentation is a bit more scattershot and the options for Linux on an ARM Chromebook are less straight forward then simply using a UEFI bootloader and installing your favorite distro.

Arch Linux ARM

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/rockchip/samsung-chromebook-plus

Arch Linux ARM got off to a good start. It was the first distro I found and it had a page dedicated to my Chromebook model with fairly comprehensive documentation on how to install, however things got rocky quickly. The first issue I ran into was that attempting to run “wifi-menu” as described in the installation instructions yielded an error. After some googling I discovered this could be resolved by downloading the Marvell wifi package and manually extracting it the second partition under /lib/firmware/mrvl on the SD Card that the OS was installed on. It’s possible that if you used the specific ARMv8 Rockchip Chromebook image available in their download page this issue would be resolved, however the instructions specific to my Chromebook did not specify to use this image, and instead use the generic aarch64 image so that was the image I used.

Link to the WiFi package.

https://archlinuxarm.org/packages/any/linux-firmware-marvell

Once the WiFi was working I was easily able to get the Arch install online. I then ran “pacman -Syu” and installed XFCE4, and LightDM. After all this was done I rebooted…. and the Arch install would no longer boot, instead hanging at a black screen. My best guess as to what happened was the system upgrades preformed by pacman broke something but at this point I was thoroughly fed up with Arch and decided I would much prefer something Debian based with all the familiarity and stability that comes with that.