Getting Bodhi to boot on old Chromebook - [SOLVED]

Hello All,

New to Bodhi, trying to salvage an old Chromebook (Toshiba CB35, 2GB RAM, 16GB SSD) long past its June 2019 AUE date. Bodhi seemed to install okay and works fine once booted, but things are in a semi-broken state. Powering up brings me to a bare grub prompt where I have to type in a few commands to actually get Bodhi to boot.

How I got here (perhaps worth skipping if you're not interested in repurposing Chromebooks, but including here to share some experience): Since the outdated and unpatched ChromeOS on it is inconsistent with the modern Chrome experience and not all that safe to have on the network, I partly disassembled the case to access and remove the firmware protect screw (I find this whole notion surreal, but there you have it - it's common in Chromebooks for an actual screw in the motherboard to close a circuit that prevents firmware updates), allowing me to replace the BIOS with UEFI software (TianoCore) obtained from MrChromebox.tech. This precludes the possibility of booting ChromeOS (though as noted that feature was no longer worthwhile on this hardware), but provides better overall support for Windows (ho-hum) and Linux (yay!). Once that was done, I started experimenting with installing different Linux distros, and found that on this limited hardware Bodhi provided the overall experience I liked best.

Other distros

Linux Lite and Lubuntu both installed successfully, booting normally and providing a usable desktop. My problem with both of these was that they come packed with a lot of software I don't need on this device and run dog slow with this processor/memory config. This set me off hunting for more lightweight distros.

The Puppy variant I tried (Fossapup) was just, well, odd - it seemed strongly oriented toward booting off a thumb drive and it was unclear how to get it installed on the SSD. What I saw running it off the Live drive didn't encourage me to investigate further.

Beryllium (BunsenLabs effort along the lines of the abandoned Gallium OS) is intriguingly minimalist. I got that installed okay and it offered better performance than Lite or Lubuntu, but on reboot went to the grub prompt - at that point I moved on to Bodhi, but I expect I could have gotten it to where I have Bodhi now had I persisted.

So back to where I am now with Bodhi . . .

At this point, none of the UEFI boot options appear to work from the Boot menu. If I just let it boot through to the default, it takes me to the grub prompt. After a bit of search, I turned up this web page:

www.ubuntubuzz.com/2016/03/booting-gnulinux-manually-with-grub-prompt.html

. . . that gave me enough clues to put together the following commands and get Bodhi booted:

set root=(hd0,gpt2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.8.0-50-generic root=/dev/sda2
initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.8.0-50-generic
boot

. . . which is what I'm going through now every time I boot it.

I feel I'm probably 90% of the way to having this working normally, but my attempts either to update the UEFI boot options or to generate a new grub config based on the above info haven't gotten me there yet. Booting either takes me right back to the grub prompt (so type in all the above) or to a kernel panic and fail.

I don't really know what I'm doing, but have been emboldened by the utter disposability of this laptop to just try stuff in my spare time the last few weeks and get this far. What I'm really hoping is that someone with an actual understanding of how the boot process works will look at this and say "Well for heaven's sake you pinhead, all you have to do is run <grub-maker-thingy> and put those parameters into the <obviously-named> tab, and Bob's your uncle."  Fingers crossed.

Any thoughts? Any requests for specific additional info that might be relevant?

Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks for having a look. Hopefully someone can help get me transitioned from a frustrated obsolete Chromebook owner to an excited Bodhi user. What I've seen of Bodhi so far has been very encouraging.