I was gifted an old Acer Chromebook from a relative who was no longer using so figured I might as well do something fun with it and get some practice switching out operating systems. Linux Mint Xfce was my flavor of choice seeing as though it is a pretty lightweight distro. The main resource I used to learn how to do this was a tutorial by mrchromebox
The first step would be to back up any data because your machine is going to get wiped clean. I decided to skip this step since this computer didn’t have anything of use to me on it.
You’re going to want to get a USB drive. It doesn’t have to have loads of storage. I used a 32GB drive but you shouldn’t need nearly that much. There are various ways to create a bootable USB but I chose to use a program called Rufus.
After downloading Rufus, you’re going to want to find your Linux distribution of choice and download the iso image for it.
The next step is to plug in your drive and run Rufus. On the Drive Properties menu you’ll want to select your device and under Boot Selection choose “Disk or ISO image”. See Rufus’ documentation for any issues. Once you hit Start it will usually take a couple minutes to copy the ISO files onto your drive.
Now that we have our bootable USB, you will need to enable developer mode on your Chromebook. You’ll need to press [Esc + refresh key + power button] on your machine. This can be done from the login screen or when you’re already logged in. You’ll be presented with a white screen saying “OS verification is off”
The next step is to disable write protection. My particular Chromebook model has a write protected screw that needs to be removed to make changes to the firmware. This part was a bit tricky, because I could not get the screw out for the life of me. After trying almost every screwdriver size I had, I ended up cutting the trace leading to the write protect screw. This worked like a charm for me.
You will then want to log into the chromebook and open up a crosh shell by pressing CTRL+ALT+T, then take the following steps:
Apologies for the glare in the last pics but please appreciate my Bulls shirt :)