[sf-lug] Upgrading Lubuntu on John's Chromebook

[aaronco36 at sdf.org]

Quoting John Strazzarino <jstrazzarino at gmail.com> from [1]:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have a Dell 3180 chromebook with 4GB of RAM and a 16GB SSD.  It is
currently running lubuntu 25.10, with mr chrome box software which
InInstalled using the entire 16GB SSD.  I’m  trying to install 26.04
lubuntu but the installer says that I don’t have enough space to install
it.  It says it needs 8 GB of RAM, which I don’t have.

I booted the chromebook from a usb stick and use the try it option of
lubuntu and tried to use info found on Google to delete the SSD, but was
not successful.
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Hey John and others,
Mostly agree with what Ken already wrote at [2] based upon my own experience.
In addition to using a USB drive, you can also using a 16GB or larger
microSD card in the Dell 3180 chromebook's side slot solely for the
purposes of the upgrade, somewhat similar to the previous suggestion at [3].
Don't know if the Lubuntu USB's "Try It" live boot option is ideal for
this, but John, you've apparently successfully used a Lilydog Linux[4]
liveUSB before for installation on Dell 3180 chromebooks, and Lilydog does
seem to have an acceptably efficient/fast liveUSB "Try It" option.

You could partition such a microSD card at the liveUSB's commandline by
using 'fdisk /dev/sdX' (X=b for the microSD) followed by creating a 8 GB
Linux type 82 swap partition and the rest of the microSD drive as a Linux
type 83.

You could then use the acceptably efficient/fast liveUSB to format and
activate the microSD's swap partition using something like
'mkswap /dev/sdb1 && swapon /dev/sdb1'
This way, you'd have 4 GB of internal physRAM and an extra 8 GB of swapspace
immediately available for the upgrade (just in case the upgrade could
really use each and every bit of this!)
You could then do a quick-and-dirty formatting of /dev/sdb2 for backing
up 8 GB+ of any necessary non-upgrade-dependent files from the internal
SSD by first doing something like 'mke2fs -vj /dev/sdb2 && mkdir
/media/sdb2
&& mount /dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2'

Again, this is in line with Ken's previous suggestion :-)
-A

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References:
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[1]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2026q2/016261.html
[2]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2026q2/016262.html
[3]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2026q1/016219.html
[4]https://sourceforge.net/projects/lilidog/
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