Raspberry Pi Imager on a Chromebook

Installing and using the Raspberry Pi Imager on a Chromebook

One of my recent projects uses a Raspberry Pi. The process involves writing an operating system image to a microSD card. To help with this, the Raspberry Pi folks have an imaging application, the Raspberry Pi Imager (https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/). In addition to being an imaging utility, it has an interface for setting Pi device configuration. The installation supports Linux, and Chromebook can run Linux applications. So, it should just work. Right? Not so much. This is the process I went through to get it to work.

As an alternative to this process, the Chromebook’s Recovery Utility could be used to image removable devices: https://www.willhaley.com/blog/setup-raspberry-pi-chromebook/. However, I still wanted to use the Raspberry Pi Imager if only for the reason of leveraging its configuration interface.

A prerequisite is to install Linux on the Chromebook, which I already installed it during a previous project. Google has a support page on the topic: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439. It installs Penguin Linux, which is a flavor of Debian. After setting it up, be sure that it’s up-to-date by executing the command below.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Before settling on the procedure below, I tried to use the Raspberry Pi Imager’s Ubuntu installation package, but there were a number of dependencies missing. Because of that, I quickly abandoned that option.

Luckily, the source code repository for the Raspberry Pi Imager includes Debian build instructions: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager. Following their build instructions, the first step is to install dependencies. For quick reference, the command is below.

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends build-essential devscripts debhelper cmake git libarchive-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev liblzma-dev \
    qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools qtdeclarative5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev libgnutls28-dev \
    qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-controls2 qml-module-qtquick-layouts qml-module-qtquick-templates2 qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtgraphicaleffects

Next, pull down the source code.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager

Then, build the package.

cd rpi-imager
debuild -uc -us

Once the build is finished, the *.deb file is in the parent directory. Double-click on the file from Chromebook’s Files app to install the Raspberry Pi Imager application. Once installed, the app shows under the Linux apps.

Raspberry Pi Imager

After inserting the microSD card into the card reader, tell Chromebook to allow Linux applications to access the removable device. You can find this option in the Chromebook’s settings. Under Developers settings in the Advanced section, navigate to the Linux development environment and then to Manage USB devices. There you can grant Linux permission to removable devices. This will allow the Imager to access the microSD card.

Allowing Linux to access USB devices

At this point, the Raspberry Pi Imager should be able to write the OS image to the microSD card. Happy projecting!