My Quest to Install Debian on my ASUS C201

This post is the backstory to the more technical post I’ve also published on how to install Debian on the ASUS C201 using the mainline kernel.

As you may have noticed from my post on installing ArchLinuxARM on my ASUS C201, I’ve already been able to install a Linux distribution—even using the mainline kernel—on my Chromebook. However, the issue I’ve found in recent years is that I don’t use my Chromebook nearly as often, as I’m mostly either at home—where I have my desktop—or at work. This meant that I would often go weeks, if not months without updating it; and as anyone who has ever run ArchLinux (ARM or not) knows, every time I had to update there were a ton of updates, and the more updates you have to do in one sitting, the more likely it is that something is going to break. And that’s basically what ended up happening, which, due to lack of time, meant that I had basically left the Chromebook as dead for about a year and an half. This was not because I was incapable of reinstalling ArchLinuxARM; that, in fact, would’ve been much easier. The problem was that I wanted to use a stable distribution with a slow update cycle that would allow me to leave the Chromebook unused for a month or two at a time without needing to spend the first ten minutes updating packages and then resolving issues that come along with those updates.

All of this meant that I was going to be installing Debian on my Chromebook. Now there is an installation guide on the Debian Wiki, but it is extremely long, it assumes you have ChromeOS still installed on the eMMC—which I did not—and it also focused mostly on how to install Debian with the ChromeOS kernel, which I did not want. Sure, there’s a section there at the end about installing with the mainline kernel, but even then it’s assuming you’ve already done the previous steps and have a functioning Debian installation on the C201 already with the ChromeOS kernel on it. So for someone in my shoes with not a lot of time on my hands I had to either spend hours trying to decipher and troubleshoot an installation directly using the mainline kernel, or just give up. There were also other “distributions” like PrawnOS that basically install Debian on the C201, but they use the Linux Libre kernel, which I don’t care for—I’ve abandoned the ship of the libre distros ever since I left Parabola. Plus, not sure if you’ve noticed, but the C201 has a lot of proprietary stuff on it. So all this lead me to leaving my Chromebook unused for a year and an half.

Every now and then I’d look up to see if some guide might have come out, and I’d get my hopes up, but generally there’d be nothing new. I had this repository bookmarked for a long time called GNU/Linux and Asus C201 Chromebook, which is where I got most of these options from. But again, most of them were either really old versions of Debian or they were of the libre kind. Until one day I decided to install try out the installation guide for Debian Stretch.

Now, Debian Stretch is a really old version of Debian, which is probably why I hadn’t tried it before. It released in 2017, and reached end-of-life in 2020. I wasn’t sure how much had changed since then, but I decided it’d be worth a try, especially considering that the guide is very clear and focuses on installing with the mainline kernel. Obviously I had to modify a few things—s/stretch/trixie/—but to my great surprise it finally worked! I was able to install Debian Trixie on my C201 and finally have a stable distribution on my Chromebook. In fact, that’s what I’m writing this blog post from.

Anyways, as mentioned at the top I’m publishing an updated version of the guide on my blog for installing Debian Trixie, and I’ll likely send a pull request to the Nikolas guy who has the C201 installation guides repository to add my guide to the list.

Happy hacking and God bless you!