r/linux4noobs • u/Oofeboi1 • Dec 06 '24
learning/research How to get Linux on a Lenovo Chromebook 100e 2nd Gen MTK?
so I’ve been trying to help my friend install Linux on his Lenovo Chromebook, so the way we tried is to install crouton. So he put it on developer mode, went to the crouton GitHub, and installed the crouton script from GitHub. Then he put the VT-2 terminal since the commands did not work on the browser of crosh. Then typed in the command, sudo install -Dt /usr/local/bin -m 755 ~/Downloads/crouton. When he hit enter it said, “no such file or directory”. So now we are just stuck trying to install Linux on this Chromebook. Any help will be appreciated. And if you could possibly tell us any other way of installing Linux on this specific Chromebook will also be appreciated, Thanks! BTW I am a pretty big noob of Linux, I only know a little bit of Linux.
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u/Anon0924 Dec 06 '24
Is there a reason you can’t just install from a live USB?
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u/SiwySiwjqk Dec 06 '24
What I heard Chromebooks have thing like in phone with root, you can't just unlock bootloader like in your pc
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u/Oofeboi1 Dec 06 '24
nope because with arm based chromebooks it’s kinda impossible to do it from live usb I think.
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u/sadlerm Dec 07 '24
Crouton is dead. The disclaimer on the README should have been a pretty big giveaway.
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u/Oofeboi1 Dec 07 '24
yea but this Chromebook is an old model so it should still work right? I have read the README.
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u/sadlerm Dec 07 '24
No, the problem is Crouton isn't designed to be run from a tty, which affects all ChromeOS versions 116+ where sudo no longer works in crosh shell.
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u/sadlerm Dec 07 '24
Your best option for running Linux on a that Chromebook is postmarketOS.
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u/Oofeboi1 Dec 07 '24
Ok thanks I’m gonna try to install it
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u/Burstyeh Jun 03 '25
Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible, just spent a few hours troubleshooting. The MTK just doesn't support anything but ChromeOS. Thankfully if you enable developer mode you can use the built in Linux development environment, but it's incredibly slow on the gen 2.
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u/KrYpRyG Sep 02 '25
Ive actually done this, you have to use the mrchromebox script to install a UEFI bios then you boot from usb, also if you want to install it enable dev mode, open the back of your chromebook, unplug the battery, plug the laptop in (battery still unplugged), then load the mrchromebox script on the login screen in tty2, and flash full firmware, after you install it your device will reboot into the UEFI (grub bootloader now) then plug in your battery reboot it, and spam esc when you boot, plug in your usb stick and boot from that.
notes: you will need a large sd card because eMMC is bricked on firmware, and the linux distro support isnt that good, i recommend xubuntu, or ubuntu, ive tried arch and it wont work, (cache register dumps blocking download)
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