I recently bought an HP Chromebook from Abhas who had already flashed coreboot in it. I ran a fresh installation of Debian 12 (Bookworm) on it with KDE Plasma.
Right after installation, the Wi-Fi and bluetooth were working, but I was facing two issues:
-
Playing a music file or any audio file does not give any audio.
-
Keyboard buttons like the ones for brightness and audio adjustment were not working (alphabet keys were working).
Fixing audio
I ran the script mentioned here and that fixed the audio.
The instructions from that link are:
git clone https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio
cd chromebook-linux-audio
./setup-audio
Fixing keyboard
I asked my friend Alper for help on fixing the keyboard as he has some experience with Chromebooks. Thanks a lot Alper for the help. I am documenting our steps here for helping others who are facing this issue.
Note: This works in X11. For wayland, the steps might differ.
To set system-wide keyboard configuration on Debian systems:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
Choose “Chromebook” as the “Keyboard Model”.
Each DE should default to the system configuration, but might need its own configuration which would similarly be available in their GUI tools. But you can check and set it manually from the command line, for example as in this thread.
To check the keyboard model Xorg-based DEs:
$ setxkbmap -print -query | grep model:
model: pc104
To change it temporarily, until a reboot:
$ setxkbmap -model chromebook
If it’s not there in KDE settings that would be a bug, To change it persistently for KDE:
$ cat >>.config/kxkbrc <<EOF
[Layout]
Model=chromebook
EOF
This thread was helpful.