Arch Linux on the HP "DRAGONAIR" Chromebook x360 14c

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Greetings again! Back in the new year with another cheap Chromebook I’ve “Chrultrabook’d” so to speak. Got rid of ChromeOS and the Google bootloader, then installed Arch Linux the easy way on this guy.

Having already gone through the removal of write protect documented here and having already installed the latest firmware from MrChromebox per his script, I’ve reconnected the battery and run through the “archinstall” install script for Arch Linux.

As I’m apparently not able to install the “asciinema” package during the “archinstall” script’s installation procedure due to some python errors, I’ll share this short recording of the initial part of the automated install process. Yes, call me lazy for using “archinstall” but it sure beats the hell out of constantly triple-checking whether I’ve gone through the same steps over and over. I’m a Fedora user at heart, but I’ll be testing some packages from the AUR on this converted ultrabook on and off.

Shame about the eMMC being there and not having a populated NVMe slot on this HP “DRAGONAIR” board though, otherwise I’d throw one of my spare tester NVMe drives in.

Next, I went ahead and ran through the automated scripts to enable proper keyboard button mapping, and to make sure Audio was functioning properly, then rebooted.

After that, I made sure to install the rua (linked) AUR helper to install packages through a safe Rust interface from the AUR. Two such packages I’m interested in are the Jottacloud backup utility and Tailscale…..however Tailscale is an official Arch package now apparently.

Last thing I did was gather some of the aforementioned packages as well as BIOS/mainboard info for others that are looking to turn this Chromebook into a Linux-native ultrabook.

hp dragonair with arch linux