Omarchy on an Acer C720 Chromebook
Omarchy on an Acer C720 Chromebook
I've been rocking an Acer C720 as my day-to-day machine since 2016. This thing is a beast; it's handled every task I've thrown at it, from streaming, to gaming, to development. Lately, though, it's been in a state of disrepair. My Crouton chroots have been slowly failing, and the device itself has stopped recieving ChromeOS updates. So, I figured it was about time to try something new. Enter Omarchy.
What is Omarchy?
Omarchy is an opinionated Linux distribution from the folks at 37signals, creators of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails. Omarchy creates a beautifully optimized experience on top of the Hyprland window manager and Arch Linux. It's heavy on the hotkeys and the tiling window manager keeps things looking clean.
Prerequisites
The highest barrier of entry for this setup is preparing your Chromebook to boot a non-ChromeOS operating system.
Installation
The install process for Omarchy is very straightforward; create a bootable USB from the Omarchy ISO, boot from that USB, follow the prompts, wait a few minutes, done. However, the fact that I had an existing ChromeOS and the stock firmware caused a few headaches.
Formatting the Disk
Formatting the disk proved challenging for the Omarchy installer. My first few attempts resulted in an error during install. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture a screenshot of the error, but it said something like no space left on device even though I told it to reformat the whole disk.
To get around it, I dropped into a root shell from the bootable USB and ran parted manually to blow away my entire disk. Googling around and running help at the parted prompt was helpful to learn the proper incantations for parted. I removed all partitions (there were a handful of them), and then reran the installer successfully.
There was a catch, though. At the developer mode prompt, I had to press Ctrl+L to get to the BIOS, then press the ESC key to display the bootloader, then choose the hard disk as my boot media. A small price to pay for freedom.
Panic at the Firmware!
And, of course now I'm greeted with a lovely error message.
I decided to follow the manual installation instructions from the Omarchy docs. The first step of this process is to install Arch, which I found to be very straightforward as a Linux hacker. It had all the usual options, and the Omarchy docs walked me through which options to choose, like encrypted disk and the Limine bootloader. The only problem was that it resulted in the same panic message as before.
It took me a while to figure this one out, and it ended up being an issue with the Limine bootloader. The solution was to switch to Grub, the old tried-and-true bootloader of the Linux realm. I re-ran the Arch install, this time selecting Grub as the bootloader, and voilà! I now had a bootable Arch operating system.
The next step in the manual installation instructions is to run a curl ... | bash one-liner.
curl -fsSL https://omarchy.org/install | bash
Repairing the Grub Bootloader
Unfortunately, this installs Limine again and breaks the Grub bootloader. The fix for this took some serious Linux hacker skills.
- Boot the Arch USB
- Setup Wifi with
iwctl - At the terminal, mount and chroot into your disk
- Re-install the Grub bootloader
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 omarchy
mount -t btrfs -o subvol=/@ /dev/mapper/omarchy /mnt
arch-chroot /mnt
Inside the chroot
mount /dev/sda1 /boot
grub-install /dev/sda
Reboot...and huzzah!
What's next?
It's off to the races (or config files, more like it). In an upcoming article I'll dive deep into the moves that I made to customize the Omarchy experience and make it feel just right on the Acer C720.
Stay tuned!