A friend of mine recently was struggling to install Linux Mint on his Acer C720 Chromebook.

I took on the challenge and succeeded.

Here’s a summary of my steps I performed to succeed at this:

Setup the system for developer mode using google’s documentation

Create a Linux Mint bootable USB

Login to chromebook with your google credentials

Get to a shell by pressing CTRL-ALT-RightArrow (basically the former F2 key)

Login with root (use root as the password)

Type in crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_legacy=1

Type in reboot (system will reboot)

Once it comes to life, you’ll see the regular “Yellow Exclamation” screen, during which you can press CTRL-L

You’ll get a prompt asking you to press ESC to change boot sequence, go ahead

At this point you should see the Linux Mint boot screen, press TAB

replace — with mem=1G

Continue with the installation of Linux Mint as normal

Once its setup, every time you boot up the system you will have to press CTRL-L on login screen on the Red Exclamation screen to boot from the hard drive and skip the chromeos check up front

The key I found was in the mem=1G and the crosssytem commands.

I also read that Google’s newer models will have better support for installing other distros.

But since my friend had an older model, I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did.

He now has a full blown Linux system on his chromebook and is happy as a clam!

Chromebook specs:

peppy c6a-v3c-a86

acer c720 chromebook (7077.95.0)

memory: 1988M 9767 MB/s

SeaBIOS version -20131018_145217-build121-m2

SC2 M2 SSD ATA-10 Hard-Disk (57241 MiBytes)

Thought I’d write this up for the other 100s of folks that would rather stick with their working chromebooks and enjoy Linux Mint on them 🙂

Edit: After posting this post, I cross posted this to reddit and another redditor advised of an alternate solution by an image creator called distroshare:

https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/57/