Preparing for the installation

Enabling Developer Mode

All of the installation techniques described require that the Chromebook be switched into Developer Mode. There are disadvantages to making this switch - see the link for more details, but it is currently a hard requirement.

Simply, developer mode can be enabled by first entering Recovery Mode (hold the ESC and Refresh keys then press the Power key). The system will reboot and show the Recovery Mode screen. Press Control-D or wait 30 seconds. The system will boot and ask you to confirm that you wish to make the change.

Switching to recovery mode will delete any content or data stored on your system.

Enabling Developer Mode proceeds and may take over 10 minutes to complete.

Enabling USB/SD card boot

All of the installation techniques described require that the Chromebook be able to boot from either a USB device or an SD card.

To enable this, first enable Developer Mode, then boot the system and start crosh. This can be done by pressing the Control, Alt and T keys simultaneously with in Chromium browser. A new window will open showing a terminal-style prompt. Here it is necessary to type shell, followed by sudo -s. You should now have a root shell prompt.

Enable developer firmware with chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode=todev You will receive confirmation output that the firmware has been updated and that booting via USB and from an SD card is now possible.

At the Developer Mode boot screen (which you will see every time you restart the system), USB/SD card boot can be selected by pressing Control-U.