While Linux support was announced three years back on Chromebooks, which means running Linux on Chromebooks has been possible for a long time, initially, there were some basic features missing during the launch. However, Google seems to be catching up now as it is spearheading to make Chrome OS a viable platform for everyone. For instance, now you can enable microphone and GPU acceleration in Linux on Chromebooks. Both of these features were a long-standing demand from creative and power users and finally, Google has delivered the promise. So without further delay, let’s go ahead and learn how to enable microphone support and hardware acceleration in Linux on Chrome OS.
Here, we have mentioned two easy ways to turn on the microphone and GPU acceleration support in Linux on Chromebook. You can expand the table below and move to the relevant section easily.
- Turn On Microphone Support in Linux on Chromebooks
- Enable GPU Acceleration in Linux on Chromebooks
Turn On Microphone Support in Linux on Chromebooks
You can enable the microphone in Linux on Chromebooks right now and for that, you don’t need to update to the Beta or Dev channel. The feature is available in the stable channel since Chrome OS 80 and now Google offers a user-facing option to turn on microphone support in Linux.
- Next, click on “Linux development environment”.
Note: You might have to change the recording device to sysdefault: Line:0 in Audacity. For other applications, you don’t have to make any changes.
Before we begin, let me clarify that GPU acceleration has been added to almost all the Chromebooks by default since Chrome OS 81. The only caveat is that you need to upgrade the Linux container to the latest Debian Buster build. Here is how to go about it.
chrome://flags
- After that, search for “Crostini GPU Support” and enable it from the drop-down menu. You can also directly open the dedicated flag from the below address. Now, click on the “Restart” button at the bottom.
sudo apt-get install mesa-utils -y
