I have a acer c740 chromebook which I take on trips with me. It was one of the fastest cheap chromebooks when it came out and it’s still fine for browsing the web and watching movies when I’m travelling. You can still get them for under $50 on ebay. Make sure you get one with 4GB of ram if you do get one. I used to use this chromebook benchmark list to compare various models. The Acer C740 is from Feb 2015!

Unfortunately Chromeos stopped supporting this hardware a few years ago so I used MrChromebox to install Gallium and then eventually that ran out of support so I moved over to ubuntu and that went pretty well. The 16GB hard drive was a bit of a problem. I’d have to install updates piecemeal otherwise I’d run out of disk space. I would generally only have 1.5G free at most.

To free up space I’d have to run

dpkg -l linux-image

and see if I had multiple versions installed and if I did run something like this to remove them.

sudo apt remove linux-image-6.8.0-45-generic linux-headers-6.8.0-45-generic
sudo apt autoremove

I might have to reboot to get the latest kernel running before I could remove the old packages.

Anyway, I wanted to free up some disk space so I had the genius idea to move /usr to a different disk. I got one of these 128GB USB 3 drives that can just live plugged in all the time. Here’s how I made it work.

Plug in the drive and open the apps and under Utilities you’ll find Disks or you can just run gnome-disks from the terminal command line. select your 128GB drive and remove the partition on it. Then add a 16GB partition and call it usr and make it be for linux. Then add an EXFAT partition for the rest of the disk (I called mine data). now mount your usr and this’ll show up under /media/$USER/usr ($USER is your username). now copy over /usr like this

sudo rsync -Phav /usr /media/$USER/usr

That’ll take ages, but once it’s done you can then add this line to /etc/fstab

UUID=blah-blah /usr ext4 nodev 0 2

You need to replace blah-blah with the UUID of your usr partition from the disks program, click on the partition on your 128GB disk and the UUID should appear underneath. You can copy and paste on a chromebook by clicking the bottom right corner of the touchpad.

Now you need to move the old /usr so the new disk can mount onto an empty directory. As soon as you do that last command everything is going to stop working. make sure it’s the very last thing you do and everything else is set up correctly beforehand. Especially the correct UUID in /etc/fstab.

sudo bash
cd /
mkdir /old.usr
mv /usr/* /old.usr/

now reboot and it should start up just fine verify that you can ls files and sudo ls too from a terminal and if that works you can

sudo rm -rf /old.usr

Now you have oodles of space. Which you will see when you run this command.

df -h / /usr

If you want even more space you can do the same with /home I didn’t do this because I think the internal disk is faster than a silly USB drive and I wanted /home to still be fast.

If it all goes wrong

If it all goes wrong and your machine no longer boots, you can make an ubuntu bootable USB drive boot from that into safe mode and then mount your chromebook root filesystem and fix whatever is wrong. Good Luck!