I have this old HP Chromebook 14 which has only 2GB of RAM. It’s so old that google stopped supporting it (which is ridiculous as it just makes people either A. use an insecure device or B. throw it away. It is incredibly irresponsible and wasteful for google to create “disposable” computers like this… Anyway I had to get some further use out of this thing to feel better about the situation.
After first attempting to use Crouton to turn an old and no longer supported chromebook into a dedicated octoprint server and laser cutter machine, I gave up and decided to go a different route. Crouton allows you to run linux AND chromeOS which is a safer option and easily reversible if something goes wrong. The issue is that my chromebook was so old that google no longer supported it anymore. Due to the limitations of not being able to access the camera for octoprint, and Beam Studio (for my FLUX Beamo laser cutter) didn’t want to connect to my laser I moved on. I’ll instead wipe the machine and give it to someone who can use it.
After trying different versions of smaller linux distros like xubuntu, Lubuntu and even minimumOS of ubuntu (only 64MB!) I had issues installing all of them. All the *buntu flavors were too big for my 2GB RAM so it didn’t even boot up. The minimumOS was going to be a lot of work if it worked to setup and install everything I’d want if it worked, but I had issues using a bad iso burning software that caused issues with this one. Luckily I kept looking and found the absolute best chromeOS replacement available.
I completely wiped ChromeOS and installed GalliumOS on the HP14 Chromebook (white chromebook) using this step-by-step guide. I have to say that it is by far the best solution and I wish I had done so much earlier. First download and burn the ISO to a USB drive. The only change I’d recommend is to use Balena etcher to burn the ISO to the USB flash drive.
Now, every time you boot up, it gives you an OS verification error (Yellow icon). At this point you must hit “Ctrl+1” within 5 seconds otherwise it’ll give you a red icon error and you’ll just need to restart again.
Default Launcher bar:
While I typically don’t mind this bar, the person I was giving this to would prefer it to be gone. It doesn’t stack multiple windows into one icon like modern OS bars do. Since I can’t remove it, I moved it to the top. It is hard to find the settings for this. You must click the “start” icon (which is called the “whisker” menu) and select the “Settings” icon at the top next to the power button (NOT the settings button in the right menu…). Then you can find the main settings for everything.
Right click this bar and go to properties to edit some stuff too if you want.
I wanted to setup the whiskerbar to autohide and be at the top of the screen (like on a mac). So from the settings app, I chose “Panel” and unlocked the bar. I then dragged it to the top and locked it again. Keep this settings window open as we’ll use it again in a sec…
New Mac-like Launcher Dock:
I installed Plank to build a mac-like dock.
sudo apt-get install plank
To add the trash can to this new dock, you need to ctrl+click the plank bar to access its options then drag the trashcan to the bar. If you add a “docklet” like the trash can or taskmanager and want to remove them later, simply drag it off the bar onto the desktop and it’ll disappear.
When I first ran this, clicking the trash can opened the audio player for some dumb reason. The fix was so stupid simple I would have never thought to do it… In the regular start menu (now at the top bar) go to settings > Preferred Applications > Utilities. In file manager “Thunar” is selected but you should select “other” and then type “thunar”. This does the trick.
Now go back in your settings menu of GalliumOS and select “Sessions and startup” then select the “Applications and startup” tab. You can then add “plank” as the command and it’ll autostart the plank docker bar on startup.
Login screen:
Be default it was using xscreensaver with a terrible interface.
Image via ubuntuBuzz
I installed light-dm instead which has a nicer and themable interface.This leads to a much more modern and sleep looking design.
Icons:
I installed numix icons, then you can set the icons by going to Whisker start menu–>the settings icon next to the log-out and power icons. Select “Appearance”and select the “icons” task.
sudo apt-get install light-dm-gtk-greeter-settings
sudo apt-get remove xscreensaver
sudo apt-get install gnome-screensaver
Chrome Keyring constantly pops up error:
Each time I logged in and opened chrome, it’d pop up asking me to login to the keyring. That’s pretty annoying. So I found in multiple places online the suggestion to delete the keyring to reset it. This worked great!
Rm ~/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring
Restart and it’ll ask you once, then never again.
Here’s an additional set of tips for what to do if you want to add more functionality.