Unleash your Chromebox: How to dual-boot Ubuntu Linux on your Chrome OS device

Google’s new Chromebox has some compelling features for large-scale IT shops. Capable of providing solid, secure performance at a reasonable price with almost no administrative overhead, they will no doubt find their way onto trading floors and into hospitals and universities, among other places. For many of the rest of us, the Chromebox, and the Chromebook before it, are a waste of perfectly good hardware. The Chromebox given out at Google I/O, for example, comes with a Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. It also has plenty of USB and video ports as well as a built-in speaker. That’s more than enough muscle to run a full-on OS like Linux instead of trying to live within the tight, web-only, confines of Chrome OS.

Hacker-friendly out of the box

Fortunately, Google and Samsung, who makes the ‘box, seem to have anticipated exactly this response, and left both the Chromebooks and Chromeboxes wide open to hacking. Not only can the devices be converted to dual-boot Chrome OS and Linux — nullifying the locked-down Chrome OS security model in the process of course — but it’s also easy to return them back to their locked-up factory defaults. What a dream setup! If only phones were this hacker friendly the word “brick” could pretty much disappear from the vocabulary on XDA.

Beginning the journey to a hacked Chromebox is as simple as flipping the developer switch in the back — slightly hidden inside the Kensington lock slot. Most Chromebooks have their developer switch in a similar location like the one shown in this diagram. Flipping the switch and rebooting opens up a wealth of new possibilities for your device. Keep in mind that the process will erase any local data you have on the device, and takes about 10 minutes to complete.

Running the developer-mode BIOS

Once you’ve gotten your Chrome OS device rebooted with the developer switch turned on (which lets you access a developer shell), you’ll be able to run the developer mode BIOS to further customize the unit. Start by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 when the device gets to the Select Language screen, to get a shell login prompt. Then log in with the username chronos(there is no password on the account) and become root using the command sudo bash(sudo simply tells the device you want to run its command line as root, and bash starts up a new shell). Finally, issue the command chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode=todevwhich switches your device to load the development BIOS by default. Note that if you’re using a Chrome-customized keyboard it might have “->” where the F2 normally is on a PC. Just press that instead of F2.

You’re now running the developer mode BIOS, which allows you to boot non-Google kernels or even to boot off an external USB device. If you have any trouble getting to this point, Google itself provides a helpful set of directions. You can always revert to the factory-default BIOS with the command chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode normal.

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