Intro

At $119.99 with free shipping this laptop is affordable to say the least. It comes with all standard bells and whistles, including a 1080p panel.

Being an "unofficial" Chromebook running CloudReady, it's not locked down to ChromeOS and sports a standard BIOS menu with very limited customization. This also has it's drawback - no Android app support on ChromeOS as of writing this.

⚠️
This product is no longer available, and I would strongly recommend against purchasing this used.

CloudReady was acquired by Google and replaced with ChromeOS Flex. It forces you to update from CloudReady to ChromeOS Flex which breaks your touchpad.

You can compile a patched kernel for Linux to get this running with your prefererred Linux distro. You can also run Windows on this device which supports the touchpad natively.

The laptop sports a single type-C port for both charging and data, but includes a dongle to split it out to a type-A port, HDMI port, and a type-C port (including passthrough charging). With 4GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage soldered and no expansion options, your options are limited. I opened up the chassis and there are no internal options to expand anything.

With no branding to speak of on the chassis, it's a great candidate to put your stickers on and make it look even cheaper than it is!

First Use

My first use of the laptop was a bit shakey, during the installation of the Linux dev environment the device froze. After forcefully shutting it down and booting it up, it was stuck in a boot loop. Downloading the CloudReady installer and putting it on a USB stick however, I was able to reinstall CloudReady and set it up again - this time successfully installing the Linux dev environment with no issues since.

The Biggest Drawback: Touchpad on Linux

My intended use for the laptop was to install Linux directly and use it for some of my work. Which is where the biggest drawback was revealed: the touchpad is not natively supported on the Linux distributions I attempted (Debian & Arch). The touchpad does work on CloudReady, Windows 10 and Windows 11 (yes, the device supports Windows 11, although with only 32GB you can't install to the built in storage).

Original "Solution" & Conclusion

Solution?

When you search around for information on being able to use the touchpad on Linux, you find very vague information - mainly referencing extracting the driver from Windows and using it on Linux (which makes no sense) and extracting the driver from CloudReady (which makes more sense). But no information on how - and while I consider myself an "advanced" Linux user, most of that is on servers and I have no idea how to actually accomplish this.

With little to no information forthcoming, I tried to tackle the issue. As it turns out, Gallium OS is built around being used on Chromebooks and has their own port of the ChromeOS touchpad driver! I was able to download their packages and install them. However, unfortunately this did not render my touchpad usable - and further tinkering ultimately resulted in making my install unusable.

Current Conclusion

At this time it appears touchpad support evades me, and I have reverted back to CloudReady for usage in the meantime. The laptop still impresses me, and I hope to find a solution at some point. The only other potential solution is to use AUR on ArchLinux to install the port, however I have elected to delay those tests for the time being.

Updated Conclusion

I was able to install with a patched kernel and get a working touchpad.

Linux on IOXO CloudReady Chromebook: Patched Kernel
IntroHello all! It’s been a while since I made the original post, and while I shelved the idea, it’s resurfaced. I was able to locate the commit on Neverware’s kernel with the fix - and after figuring out how to compile my own kernel, am now successfully running Linux on