Installing ChromeOS on old EEE-PC

My wife’s work is plagued with a bunch of EEE PCs with Windows XP on it. There isn’t any reason to have windows, and so we are installing ChromeOS on them. I went to: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/software/how-install-chromeos-on-old-laptop-3636672/

This tells us to use cloudready’s image. Downloading the 630M file gives us a zipp’ed .bin file, and then one is supposed to use a Chrome extension to write a USB file. No idea if it will work on Linux, and the eee-PCs really don’t boot (and winXP is so old, I wouldn’t let it on the internet).

So I ran: kvm -hda ./chromiumos_image.bin

since I had previously run file on the image to see that it had an x86 boot sector. Here comes syslinux and some logo images with cloudready, which seems to be in some kind of reboot loop. Having confirmed that it was in fact bootable, I looked at what to do.

So, I looked deeper:

sudo losetup -f ./chromiumos_image.bin sudo kpartx -av /dev/loop0

This resulted in 27 partitions, which is really too many to poke around with.

I was hoping to put the installer on a USB key that I use for finnix and other rescue stuff, but at 5G and wanting to find a HD, etc. it was really too big. Maybe it would boot live from the USB key?

I googled a bit and found:

https://www.howtogeek.com/128575/how-to-run-chrome-os-from-a-usb-drive-and-use-it-on-any-computer/ which suggests running it in a VM, which isn’t a super great idea, as it would lose much of the GL possibilities.

So I dd’ed it to a 32G USB key I had around, and booted this in the eee-PC. It installed and worked great.