Install Kali Samsung Chromebook

Samsung Chrome Book

The Samsung ARM Chromebook is an ultraportable laptop. It was quite a challenge, but we have a Kali image that runs great on the Chromebook.

Our Kali Chromebook image contains two boot partitions – one holds a kernel hardcoded to boot from SD, and the other holds a kernel hardcoded to boot from USB. Depending on your USB storage media type, make sure to mark the relevant boot partition with higher priority after you dd the image to your USB device, as instructed in the last stages of this guide.

Kali on Chromebook – User Instructions

If all you want to do is install Kali on your Samsung ARM Chromebook, follow these instructions:

  1. Get a nice fast 8 GB SD card or USB stick.
  2. Put your Chromebook in developer mode.
  3. Download the Kali Samsung ARM Chromebook image from our downloads area.
  4. Use the dd utility to image this file to your SD /USB device. In our example, we use a USB stick which is located at /dev/sdb. Change this as needed.
Alert! This process will wipe out your SD card. If you choose the wrong storage device, you may wipe out your computers hard disk.
dd if=kali-chromebook.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512k

This process can take awhile depending on your USB storage device speed and image size.

This is the point where you need to mark either boot partition 1 or 2 to have higher priority. The number with the higher priority will boot first. The example below will give priority 10 to the first partition (-i), and will thus boot successfully from a SD card.
cgpt repair /dev/sdb
cgpt add -i 1 -S 1 -T 5 -P 10 -l KERN-A /dev/sdb
cgpt add -i 2 -S 1 -T 5 -P 5 -l KERN-B  /dev/sdb

To see your partition list and order, use the command cgpt show.

root@kali:~# cgpt show /dev/sdb
       start        size    part  contents
           0           1          PMBR
           1           1          Pri GPT header
           2          32          Pri GPT table
        8192       32768       1  Label: "KERN-A"
                                  Type: ChromeOS kernel
                                  UUID: 63AD6EC9-AD94-4B42-80E4-798BBE6BE46C
                                  Attr: priority=10 tries=5 successful=1
       40960       32768       2  Label: "KERN-B"
                                  Type: ChromeOS kernel
                                  UUID: 37CE46C9-0A7A-4994-80FC-9C0FFCB4FDC1
                                  Attr: priority=5 tries=5 successful=1
       73728     3832490       3  Label: "Linux filesystem"
                                  Type: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4
                                  UUID: E9E67EE1-C02E-481C-BA3F-18E721515DBB
   125045391          32          Sec GPT table
   125045423           1          Sec GPT header
root@kali:~#

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the Chromebook with the SD / USB plugged in (NOT IN THE BLUE USB PORT!). At the developer boot prompt, hit CTRL+ALT+U, which should boot you into Kali Linux. Log in to Kali (root / toor) and startx. That’s it, you’re done!

Kali on Samsung Chromebook – Developer Instructions

If you are a developer and want to tinker with the Kali Samsung Chromebook image, including changing the kernel configuration and generally being adventurous, check out our Custom Chromebook Kernel / Image article.