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#1 2013-03-19 13:18:33

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

I read that Torvalds started using a Google Pixel Chromebook and adapted the kernel to use it completely.
Do anyone knows what kernel version will have all the Pixel updates? or has experience of installing Archlinux on it?

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#2 2013-03-28 13:36:39

KairiTech
Member
From: Toronto, Canada
Registered: 2011-06-04
Posts: 275

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Look here and here. Might help. Hoping to get Arch onto a tablet someday so this shows some progress.

Last edited by KairiTech (2013-03-28 13:38:02)

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#3 2013-04-07 11:47:25

redhalo
Member
Registered: 2009-08-11
Posts: 22

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Rough guide that isn't Arch specific, but I'll address below:
http://blog.brocktice.com/2013/03/09/ru … ook-pixel/

You have to use the linux-mainline kernel in AUR (currently 3.9-rc5) and change the PKGBUILD to run the configuration to turn on building the "chromeos_laptop" module.

Loading certain modules at boot doesn't seem to be working correctly for me for some reason. I have to manually remove and then reload "chromeos_laptop", "amtel_mxt_ts" and "tpm_tis force=1 interrupts=0". If anyone can let me know what logs they need, I'd appreciate some help sorting this out.

Last edited by redhalo (2013-04-07 11:51:07)

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#4 2013-04-08 08:08:44

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Question, when browsing do the pictures appears small as stamps? (As effect of the high pixel density?)

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#5 2013-04-08 21:48:19

redhalo
Member
Registered: 2009-08-11
Posts: 22

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

This is actually a complicated thing and a very good question. I've only tried using dwb and Chromium currently.

With Chromium, I can set the default zoom to 200% (or whatever you want) and it scales images, fonts and layouts...pretty much the whole damn thing. The images look fine mostly, doubled up on the pixels then aliased, but you sometimes become aware of how low res they may have been originally when viewed next to text because the text looks so gorgeous.

dwb will scale the text...and that's about it, making the layouts and such break on almost every page.

The issue I have with Chromium though is that Google didn't think about scaling the interface, tabs and such, so that's really tiny. Also, image scaling happens even when viewing standalone images, which means I have to do a lot of scrolling when viewing screenshots in the screenshot threads.

I can assume most third party browsers will operate like dwb does. I know that Google offers a hidpi option interface for Chromeos, Mac, and I believe recently for Windows 8 since hidpi devices exist specifically for them, but it's grayed out for Linux users for some strange reason. I expect this to be handled at some point as the industry adopts more screens like this.

I can't stress how beautiful page rendering looks on Chromium despite their gui flaws.

Last edited by redhalo (2013-04-08 22:00:14)

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#6 2013-04-08 21:58:15

redhalo
Member
Registered: 2009-08-11
Posts: 22

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Just to expand, I had previously read from Google that scaling the pages works best when the page uses flexible measurements to arrange the layout, 'em's, 'mm's or percentages for example, and that pixel based measurements are supposed to just fall apart. So far I haven't seen a broken layout on Chromium yet, so either everyone converted a while ago, or Google is better at this then they acknowledge.

Last edited by redhalo (2013-04-08 21:59:05)

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#7 2013-04-10 07:33:14

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

I am more interested about the behavior in archlinux, since I would remove ChromeOS (there are only 32GB of disk for pete's sake!).

With arch, I am not worried much about the fonts, using infinality and correctly setting the monitor size (adding a monitor section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-monitor.conf) I am fairly sure the fonts will look perfect.

I am worried about the pictures because in firefox I did not find a way to scale the pictures and only the pictures. Maybe it is possible with Chromium, but I never checked. (I use Firefox since I cannot browse anymore without AdBlock.)

Last edited by ezzetabi (2013-04-10 07:35:33)

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#8 2013-04-10 20:30:35

redhalo
Member
Registered: 2009-08-11
Posts: 22

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Yeah, that's what I said, Chromium scales the images. Also no need for infinality, fonts look perfect as is.

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#9 2013-04-10 22:22:08

portix
Member
Registered: 2009-01-13
Posts: 757

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

redhalo wrote:

dwb will scale the text...and that's about it, making the layouts and such break on almost every page.

dwb can also scale images if full-content-zoom is enabled.

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#10 2013-04-11 20:44:54

redhalo
Member
Registered: 2009-08-11
Posts: 22

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

portix wrote:
redhalo wrote:

dwb will scale the text...and that's about it, making the layouts and such break on almost every page.

dwb can also scale images if full-content-zoom is enabled.

I was just about to post to say that you were wrong that it only scaled text, but then rechecked the settings and saw the full-content-zoom option that I have never noticed before. Thanks man, I'm switching back to dwb, had always been my favorite. One small thing I've noticed, comparing the image scaling from dwb to Chromium, dwb's is slightly blurrier. Not a deal breaker for me though.

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#11 2013-04-12 07:56:34

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Sorry guys, I am a little confused.

If you issue this command in your pixel chromebook:

$ xdpyinfo | grep ' reso\| dime'
  dimensions:    1680x1050 pixels (373x233 millimeters)
  resolution:    114x114 dots per inch

What is the output? The output here is just an example from my notebook.


I am asking because from what I expected the fonts should need no resizing as the font renderer (freetype2 usually) should scale according to the "dots per inch" value.

Last edited by ezzetabi (2013-04-12 07:58:49)

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#12 2013-04-14 08:48:02

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

ezzetabi wrote:

If you issue this command in your pixel chromebook, what is the output?

$ xdpyinfo | grep ' reso\| dime'
  dimensions:    2560x1700 pixels (677x449 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch

ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

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#13 2013-04-14 19:25:14

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

And I assume the monitor is not indeed 67 x 45 cm? [~26.6x17.7 inches] So it is wrongly configured... what font size do you use normally?

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#14 2013-04-14 19:41:25

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

ezzetabi wrote:

And I assume the monitor is not indeed 67 x 45 cm? [~26.6x17.7 inches] So it is wrongly configured... what font size do you use normally?

Yes the calculation is off, i roughly double the fontsizes i normally use, right now i'm using 25 in the terminal.


ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

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#15 2013-04-14 20:23:28

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Instead of doubling the font size, did you try to fix the DPI? You can do that measuring the monitor size and writing it in a file.
Doing that the fontconfig applications (most of them) should give you the correct font size (so a 25 point font will appear as large as expected).

(Example from my notebook)

% cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-monitor.conf

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier             "<default monitor>"
    DisplaySize            286 178    # In millimeters
EndSection

Last edited by ezzetabi (2013-04-15 06:41:32)

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#16 2013-04-15 08:06:48

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

@ezzetabi: i'm running Arch in a chroot at the moment, so i can't change the X config directly (these are the values ChromeOS is working with).


ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

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#17 2013-04-18 14:08:20

fmkaiba
Member
Registered: 2012-07-21
Posts: 6

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

I am running arch on my chromebook pixel, everything is great.

I was a thinking of writing up a detailed tutorial for others.

Btw, i am running a custom linux-mainline package optimized for this device.


Anything that someone has thats not working right? I have yet to find any bug in my configuration. (Running Gnome3)

Last edited by fmkaiba (2013-04-18 14:25:12)

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#18 2013-04-19 12:01:15

ezzetabi
Member
Registered: 2006-08-27
Posts: 947

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

A tutorial, please do!

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#19 2013-04-28 12:34:17

fmkaiba
Member
Registered: 2012-07-21
Posts: 6

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Sorry for the delays, I have run into some issues i am slowly working through,

A few things don't work right out of the box, like the generation of /proc/mtrr

I have managed to solve most problems through a customized kernel config, and some tweaks in /etc/xorg.conf.d/*.conf

I still have a couple problems with the shared video memory not being found, (You can clearly see the difference in the memory mapping tables that chromeos generates, versus my config of linux-mainline

I will get back to you all with a good tutorial once i have all the odds and ends figured out.

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#20 2013-07-22 00:45:18

matchew
Member
Registered: 2013-07-22
Posts: 19

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

fmkaiba wrote:

Sorry for the delays, I have run into some issues i am slowly working through,

A few things don't work right out of the box, like the generation of /proc/mtrr

I have managed to solve most problems through a customized kernel config, and some tweaks in /etc/xorg.conf.d/*.conf

I still have a couple problems with the shared video memory not being found, (You can clearly see the difference in the memory mapping tables that chromeos generates, versus my config of linux-mainline

I will get back to you all with a good tutorial once i have all the odds and ends figured out.


First, this is my first forum post here. So I a apologize if thread bumping is frowned upon.
However, seeing how this is the only pixel thread on my search I am wondering if you ever got around to writing that tutorial?

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#21 2013-08-01 08:34:59

aterocana
Member
Registered: 2013-07-30
Posts: 26

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

I'll be interest in that too. Also because I'm new to Arch, I installed successfully Debian on it (I wrote also a tutorial if you want), but I don't have any idea of how manage it on Arch. Thanks

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#22 2013-08-28 11:38:44

tampix
Member
From: Paris, France
Registered: 2013-06-08
Posts: 4

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Hi,
I did an install of Arch on my Pixel 2 month ago, only problem i faced was the deadly "Legacy BIOS removed" (google it) ...
Oh, that and the trick to make the trackpad work (rmmod chromeos-laptop; modprob chromeos-laptop each time i reboot the machine, the bug was referenced in the kernel mailing-list ;])

What problem you people have with an Arch install?

ps : i did it on the internal ssd, wiping chromeos in the process, so yeah, i had to do a recovery when i encountered the bios bug
pps: this gist might help you: https://gist.github.com/thirteen37/5559107

Last edited by tampix (2013-08-28 11:40:24)

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#23 2013-09-12 08:10:23

aterocana
Member
Registered: 2013-07-30
Posts: 26

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

tampix wrote:

Hi,
I did an install of Arch on my Pixel 2 month ago, only problem i faced was the deadly "Legacy BIOS removed" (google it) ...
Oh, that and the trick to make the trackpad work (rmmod chromeos-laptop; modprob chromeos-laptop each time i reboot the machine, the bug was referenced in the kernel mailing-list ;])

What problem you people have with an Arch install?

ps : i did it on the internal ssd, wiping chromeos in the process, so yeah, i had to do a recovery when i encountered the bios bug
pps: this gist might help you: https://gist.github.com/thirteen37/5559107

Actually I tried to install on it wiping the whole ssd. When I boot with Legacy BIOS I can't boot from SSD (while I can from a USB key). So I supposed I set up wrong the partition, but I checked and it was correct (I use syslinux). Any advice?

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#24 2013-09-15 17:24:24

oiad
Member
Registered: 2010-03-02
Posts: 22

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

I have setup Arch on my Pixel without any problem.  I have created a quick guide for getting it up and running without removing ChromeOS.  I cheated and used ArchBang as my base but it works well. 

If anyone is interested

ArchLink

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#25 2013-09-20 13:20:59

aterocana
Member
Registered: 2013-07-30
Posts: 26

Re: Installing arch on Pixel Chromebook, do anyone has experience?

Ok, I successfully installed Arch on the Pixel. I had to use grub2 to boot it up, I don't why it doesn't work with syslinux, at least for me. I'll probably write a tutorial when I'll have some time to spend. Anyway, any of you guys has successfully managed the keyboard backlight? I had a script that worked fine in Debian but it seems it doesn't on Arch. I copy here the script, maybe you can find the problem (ok, it's in the line DEVFILE=/sys/class/leds/chromeos\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness, but I miss the chromeos in leds folder ):

#!/bin/bash

DIRECTION=$1
INCREMENT=10

DEVFILE=/sys/class/leds/chromeos\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness

CURR=`cat $DEVFILE`
NEW=$CURR

if [ "$DIRECTION"x == "up"x ]; then
    NEW=$(( $CURR + $INCREMENT ))
fi

if [ "$DIRECTION"x == "down"x ]; then
    NEW=$(( $CURR - $INCREMENT ))
fi

if [ "$DIRECTION"x == "set"x ]; then
    NEW=0
fi

if [ "$CURR" -gt "100" ]; then
    NEW=100
fi

if [ "$CURR" -lt "0" ]; then
    NEW=0
fi

echo $NEW > $DEVFILE

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