Chrome OS is a light-weighted Operating System with play store support. Windows 10/11 got many features but having a lot of applications and features makes the PC slow Chrome OS on other hand being light-weighted has amazing performance and needs less computing power and therefore consumes less battery. With the play store support, Chrome OS users can download android as well as Linux apps on their laptops/PCs. So in this article, I will show you how you can install Chrome OS on your PC from scratch.
How To Install Chrome OS on your PC?
Before we begin the guide let us first see the requirements.
Requirements:
UEFI support in the motherboard.
Legacy BIOS support has also been added, but there are a few limitations. You can read the documentation here.
Support for AMD CPU and GPU has been added, but currently, it supports AMD Ryzen 3XXX and AMD Stoney Ridge processors.
Intel-based CPU and GPU.
You will need a USB flash drive with at least 16 GB of storage.
Once your requirements are met, you can move forward and download some relevant files.
Download the following files:
1. Download the Linux Mint Cinnamon image. You can use other Linux distributions but Linux Mint Cinnamon is pretty light-weighted. So, I suggest you use it.
2. Now, download Rufus so you can flash Linux Mint Cinnamon on the USB drive.
3. Download Chrome OS recovery image: Chrome Recovery image lets you remove and reinstall the Chrome OS if it isn’t working properly. Follow these steps to download the Chrome OS recovery image.
Navigate to this link to download the Official Chrome OS recovery image.
Open the website. Now, download the specific recovery image based on your processors.
If you are using 4th or newer generation Intel processors then search for “rammus” and download the latest recovery image.
If you are using 3rd generation Intel processors then download the latest “samus” recovery image.
Download the “Zork” recovery image if you are using AMD Rizen.
Likewise, download the “grunt” recovery image if you are using AMD Stoney Ridge.
4. Download Brunch: Brunch is a framework that creates generic Chrome OS images from recovery images that you downloaded, so it can be installed on Windows PC. To download this file Navigate this link and search for the latest build and then click on “Assets“.Then, download the tar.gz file.
5. Now Download the “install.sh” script which will automatically install Chrome OS without manually typing the commands. Click here to download install.sh file and press Ctrl + S to save the file.
We have now downloaded all the necessary files. Now we can begin the installation.
Download Chrome OS on PC with Play Store Support
Before we go ahead I would briefly like to discuss the things we will be doing going ahead. First off we will make a bootable USB drive containing all the necessary files. Then we will boot Linux Mint Cinnamon on our Windows PC. Finally, we will install the scripts to download the required dependencies and libraries to run Chrome OS on our PC.
This process will delete all the files and folders from your PC. Make sure to create a backup before we go ahead.
Creating Bootable USB Drive:
Step 1: Connect your USB Drive.
Step 2: Next, Open Rufus.
Step 3: Now, click on the “Select ” Button and select Linux Mint Cinnamon Image.
Managing all the necessary files
Step 4: Then, click on the “Start” button. A Few prompts will appear click on “Yes” and “OK” until the flashing process is done.
Step 5: Create a folder named “Chrome OS” on your Desktop and move the “install.sh” file to the Chrome OS folder.
Step 6: Next, Right-click on the Brunch file and select “Extract to Brunch_rd1…“. All the files will be extracted on the folder on the desktop. Next, move all the extracted Brunch files to the “Chrome OS” folder.
Step 7: Now Extract the Chrome OS recovery image wherever you want, rename the file as rammus_recovery.bin. If you have downloaded another recovery image then accordingly rename the folder.
Step 8: Lastly, move “rammus_recovery.bin” to the Chrome OS folder.
Step 9: Now, move the whole Chrome OS folder on which you flashed Linux Mint Cinnamon Image.
Booting into Linux Mint Cinnamon:
1. Plug the USB Drive on the PC in which you want to install Chrome OS and keep it plugged in if you want to install Chrome OS on the same device.
2. Next, restart your PC and press the boot key simultaneously to get into BIOS/UEFI menu. See the following table to know the boot key of your PC.
3. Once you have to get into BIOS, move to the Boot tab and select “UEFI” from the Boot List Option. Move to the next option if this option is not available on your PC.
4. Next, Move to the Security tab and disable “Secure” Boot. An important point to note is that the Security tab will differ from PC to PC. Make sure that you disable the Secure tab.
5. Lastly, go to the “Exit” tab and choose “Exit Save Changes“. Immediately, after that, start pressing the boot key again. You will be asked to choose your boot device. Select the USB drive and press Enter.
6. You will be booted to Linux Mint Cinnamon. If you are prompted with a screen choose “Start Linux Mint “.
Install Chrome OS on your PC
1. Now you will be booted directly into the Linux Mint. Click on the Network Icon on the Right-Corner on your Desktop and connect to Wi-Fi because we have to download some libraries and dependencies.
2. Next, open the “Home” folder on your Desktop and move to the “File System” tab.
3. Now, search for “Chrome OS” in the search bar.
4. Next, open the folder and right-click inside the folder, and open the Terminal. Here, type sudo sh install.sh and hit enter. It will start downloading some libraries and dependencies.
5. A few moments later it will ask you to continue the installation. This process will delete all the files and folders on your hard drive. To proceed with the installation type yes and hit enter. It will now start installing Chrome OS on your PC.
6. After the installation is complete. Click on the start menu in the left corner and click on the “Turn Off” button. Here, choose shut down to turn off your PC.
7. Next, remove your USB Drive and then turn on your PC. Your PC will be booted into your new Chrome OS. Now enjoy your new Chrome OS, you can run Android apps and games with full play store support. You can also download Linux apps on a Chrome OS machine.
What if Chrome OS is installed on the wrong Device?
If Chrome OS is by mistake installed on your USB Stick. The reason behind this is because the hard disk is named .sda generally, but on some older PCs, it is named mcblk0 or something else,
due to this your Chrome OS gets installed on the wrong device. Let’s see how to solve this issue:
1. Open GParted from the start menu and confirm that the name of your hard disk drive is .sda. If it is not the case then note down the name of your hard drive and open install.sh using Vim editor on Linux mint.
2. Replace sda with the actual hard drive name in the last line.
3. Now save the file and execute the install.sh file and it should install Chrome OS on your PC.
Chrome OS New Features
Now you have downloaded Chrome OS so let us discuss some of its new features. It has been a decade now since the Chrome OS was first released and as the days pass by the Chrome OS is adding more and more applications and features which is making Chrome OS much easier and exciting to use. I use it and recently the development teams of Chrome OS have added new features.
1. Vertical and horizontal snapping: If you have one screen and you need to be doing a couple of things, you can grab a Window and drag it to the extreme left and release the window, and bam! you Window gets snapped on the left and that way you can have two things right next to each other. If you rotate the screen and make your screen taller rather than wider then your screen will be horizontally snapped.
2. The second thing that the Chrome OS brought up is the inclusion of keyboard shortcuts for virtual desktops and you can also reorder your Virtual desktops by dragging ’em.
Feature Flags
Now let us get into feature flags. If you are not familiar with feature flags then let me tell you this. Type chrome://flags in chrome browser which will take you to the feature flags page. You can use the search option to search the flags.
3. The first feature flag is Dark Light Mode and that’s going to work with WebUI Dark Mode. You don’t have to turn WebUI on but it will make some of your settings and system menus and all that kind of stuff follow the theme with your light or dark mode. Just enable the Dark light mode on and you will be able to switch between Light and Dark Mode.
4. Next, we have got Productivity Experiment App Launcher. If you’d like to get rid of the full-screen launcher that comes up that just takes a bunch of room and it frankly doesn’t make any sense on the desktop, so turn on this flag and you press any key on the keyboard and you will have a new system launcher on the left corner of your screen.
5. Side Search: Turn on the side search and the moment you open a website on your Chrome browser, you will see a G in the top bar, and when you click that G and boom! there comes your site search on the left side of your screen it’s this little widget search thing but it’s like the size of the phone.
I hope you will enjoy the new OS you installed on your PC. Comment below if you are facing any issues related to installation or your new OS.
