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  DATE : 2022.01.01
  TIME : 11:58
AUTHOR : SNOWCRASH@SDF.ORG
  MOOD : RELAXED
 TITLE : BRUNCH CHROMEOS
 
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Happy New Year 2022! Let's hope 2022 is better than 2021, it
would have to be a real shit show not to be. So for a long time
I have had a fascination with the "idea" of ChromeOS. But having
a perfectly good first generation Microsoft SurfaceBook I've had
no reason to go out and buy a ChromeBook. So the idea of it has
remained solidly something to contemplate for the future.

Recently I ran across something called Brunch
(https://github.com/sebanc/brunch). In short Brunch allows one to:

"Boot ChromeOS on x86_64 PC (supports most Intel CPU/GPU or AMD
Ryzen / Stoney Ridge)"

This immediately had be intrigued. It's not the first version of
something like this that I have seen, I actually installed the
free version of CloudReady on an old iMac that my daughter used
for school for the first year of the pandemic, but it was the
first one that didn't attempt to format the entire disk. In fact,
the Brunch team had guides for dual and triple boot installations.

This was just the thing I was looking for as I currently dual
boot Windows and Mint Linux. So after purging some unused shit,
downloading a gparted boot USB so I could easily resize some
partitions I was left with a nice block of space to create a new
partition to install Brunch into from my Linux Mint partition.

The install actually was a breeze, and I really appreciated that
it covered all aspects, including giving you the exact grub config
to add manually or with the grub-config gui. The only thing that
wasn't immediately clear for my was setting options. I went the
manual route of entering them in the grub config entry and should
have taken out the $options entry not realizing that they include
an easier way through "sudo edit-brunch-config" if using the crosh
shell. This confusion was definitely a user error on my part but a
minor blip for sure.

The end result is that I have a trip boot system with ChromeOS,
Linux Mint and Windows. And I am finding I really enjoy
ChromeOS. If that feeling continues I can see myself giving
serious consideration to a ChromeBook for a replacement when this
old SurfaceBook dies.

One last note, if you decide to give Brunch a try make sure to
read the docs and watch some of the YouTube videos. You will need
to disable secure boot but considering the results seeing the red
banner is only a minor annoyance.  Cheers!



-Snowcrash