Installing Linux on the Chromebook Pixel. These directions are provided AS-IS, if you lose all of your data or brick your machine, it's not my problem. Quick pre-requisites: A) You should (optionally) have a USB mouse you can plug into the Pixel for when you first boot into Linux as the touchpad and touchscreen won't work at the beginning. You can forego this bit and work from the VC console instead while performing the steps to get the touchpap/touchscreen operational but you'll need to get wireless up so you can install some packages over the network so keep that in mind. B) You need to have a USB device (or Android phone, see below) to boot from, and a way to get a Debian ISO image onto it. C) REALIZE that this will blow away Chrome OS from your drive. It's easy to restore the machine with Chroms OS again using one of the restore images found at: http://support.google.com/chromeos/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1080595 With that out of the way, here is what you do: 1) Put your Pixel into developer mode, you should really do this as the first thing when you use the laptop for the first time. Hold down "ESC" and "Refresh" at the same time while powering on the machine. BTW, those keys on the top row after ESC are just F1, F2, F3, etc. The F3 one is the "Refresh" key I mentioned. Hit Ctrl-D then Enter. It's going to take 5 minutes now as it's going to wipe the entire stateful (ie. user data) partition. From this point forward, every time you boot, it's going to say that Chrome OS can't be found or something similarly alarming like that, just ignore and hit Ctr-D or wait 30 seconds to boot into Chrome OS. But that won't be relevant for long as we're going to wipe it off the machine below :-) 2) Boot into Chrome OS and configure it enough so that you can login. Start a shell: a) Hit Ctrl-Alt-T, this brings up the chrosh window, from crosh you can do things like spawn a shell, use SSH, etc. type "help" if you're interested in more. b) Give it the "shell" command. c) Get root, "sudo bash" 3) Configure it so that we can boot into Linux images via SeaBIOS and boot from USB devices. crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_legacy=1 and then power off the machine. 4) Get yourself a Debian 7 image, I used: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/wheezy_di_rc1/amd64/iso-cd/debian-wheezy-DI-rc1-amd64-netinst.iso or just grab the latest release image: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-cd/ 5) Put that image onto something you can USB boot. You can use a USB stick, but I've been using the DriveDroid app on my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7. 6) Plug the USB image in, and power on the Pixel. When the boot screen appears hit Ctrl-L, SeaBIOS will come up and say "Hit ESC to choose boot device" so hit ESC and choose the USB device you plugged in. 7) Highlight the "Install" choice and hit TAB, add "mem=4G" to the kernel command line, place it before the double dashes. 8) Do an install, tell the partitioner to use the entire SSD drive and do things automatically. I'd recommend enabling the installation of the desktop packages so that it's easier to configure wireless. Tell the installer to use the MBR of the entire disk for the boot loader. 9) After the install finishes the reboot will bring you to the boot screen again, hit Ctrl-L to get into SeaBIOS and then ESC but this time select the interal SSD drive. It should boot up just fine. 10) Outside of the touchpad/touchscreen everything should work fine. You do have a USB mouse to use for this part right? Plug it in, your life will be simplified. Alternatively "Ctrl-Alt-F1" to get into a VC and just do all of your work from there. You have to bring the wireless up somehow so you can install packages, and it's just so much easier to do that from the graphical desktop. Anyways, let's get the input devices working. Install 'git' with: apt-get install git as root. You'll also need the kernel headers package installed in order to build kernel modules, for this install this package should be "linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64" apt-get install linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64 You'll also have to make sure you have the necessary tools to compile things. A safe way to ensure this is to install the tools necessary to build the debian kernel package, like this: apt-get build-dep linux And you should be good to go. 11) Clone my chomebook Pixel driver repo: git clone http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/chromebook_pixel.git You might even have the repo already and be reading this text file from it. :-) Now build: cd chromebook_pixel make this will leave you with "chromebook_laptop.ko" and "atmel_mxt_ts.ko" The chomebook_laptop.ko driver will instantiate the I2C devices hanging off of the i915 graphics device, these will then be seen by drivers like atmel_mxt_ts.ko which will talk over I2C to drive your touchpad and touchscreen. The chromebook_laptop.ko doesn't exist in any form in the debian kernel package you have installed on this machine, but the atmel_mxt_ts.ko does exist there but we need this newer version of it. So just keep that in mind. 12) Right now you can load these modules to see your input devices working. insmod atmel_mxt_ts.ko insmod chromebook_laptop.ko But you're going to want this to happen automatically when you boot up. I was super lazy and just copied the modules down under: /lib/modules/3.2.0-4-amd64/kernel/ specifically to: /lib/modules/3.2.0-4-amd64/kernel/drivers/input/touchscreen/atmel_mxt_ts.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-4-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/chromeos_laptop.ko and then I added one line saying: chromeos_laptop to /etc/modules 13) So you should have a fully functioning Chromebook Pixel running Linux at this point. Enjoy. Every time you boot up you'll need to do that Ctrl-L song and dance, since unfortunately you can't make SeaBIOS the default 30-sec timeout selection. Just deal with it.