Submarine
Guide (Arch)

Installing Arch Linux with Submarine

Preparation

  1. Write the Arch Linux live ISO to external media.

  2. Create a new 16MB partition for Submarine on the external media. If using ChromeOS, fdisk/cfdisk are installed by default.

  3. In ChromeOS, set the necessary flags for the Submarine partition with cgpt add -i <partition number> -t kernel -P 15 -T 1 -S 1 /dev/sdX, substituting <partition number> for the number of the Submarine partition and /dev/sdX for the block device of your external media.

  4. Write submarine-x86_64.kpart to the Submarine partition created in step 2.

  5. Reminder: to boot Submarine from external media, you first need to run the following commands as root

sudo enable_dev_usb_boot
  1. Reboot, and on the Developer Mode screen, press Ctrl+U to boot from external media.

Partitioning

  1. After booting the Arch Linux live ISO with Submarine, proceed with the regular manual installation of Arch Linux.

  2. When partitioning the internal disk, again create a 16MB partition for Submarine. You do not need to create a EFI system partition (ESP) as Submarine does not use UEFI.

Installing

  1. After chrooting into the new install, install the grub package. As there is no ESP, skip the grub-install step and only run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. You must first create the /boot/grub directory otherwise grub-mkconfig will fail.

  2. Install curl or wget, and unzip in order to download and extract Submarine. Here is the link again: https://nightly.link/FyraLabs/submarine/workflows/build/main/submarine-x86_64.zip (opens in a new tab)

  3. Arch does not package cgpt, but it is available in the AUR. Install git, and run the following commands

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/cgpt-bin.git
cd cgpt-bin
makepkg -si
  1. As before, set the necessary flags for the Submarine partition on your internal disk.

  2. Write submarine-x86_64.kpart to the Submarine partition.

  3. Proceed with the rest of the Arch Linux installation as described in the installation guide on the ArchWiki.

Postinstall

After you've finished installing, reboot and press Ctrl+D to boot from internal disk. If you did everything right, you should be looking at the Submarine boot menu. Select the number that corresponds to your system to boot into Arch.

For audio fixes for running Linux on Chromebooks, take a look at WeirdTreeThing's audio script (opens in a new tab).

Note

Fyra Labs is not affiliated with the developers of Arch Linux, this guide is unofficial.

If you're a developer of Arch Linux reading this, and want to make it official, let us know!