How to deorbit the Chromebook and repurpose it for innovators (opens in new tab)

A cheap AUE Chromebook flashed with UEFI makes a good (albeit rather storage-starved) Linux beater - but you'll have trouble with Haiku or any of the BSDs because the hardware is a little "quirky." The input devices in most of the currently-cheap x86 Chromebooks are plumbed over i2c in a slightly strange way that didn't even work entirely right on mainline Linux until fairly recently, and Bay/Cherry trail style half-SOC-half-external-codec style sound hardware that only mostly works in mainline Linux right now.

Just because I was beating on it at the time, I tried Haiku and NetBSD on a Dell Chromebook 3189 2-in-1 with Mr. Chromebox Coreboot back in August, and (quoting myself from https://pappp.net/?p=59407 ) Haiku R1B4 boots but sees no integrated input devices or sound, Haiku Nightly hrev57235 sees the mouse (which is interesting because it looks like the patch adding support should have been in R1B4), but it’s constantly drifting and spamming click events, and still no keyboard or sound. NetBSD9.0 loses track of its discs during boot, while 9.3 boots but with no integrated mouse/keyboard – there are patches under review in July ’23 to add support for them.

For about the same price as bare SBC or surplus SFF box, a hacked Chromebook gets you input devices, a display, a managed battery, and a usually rather rugged portable case, but no exposed GPIOs or UARTs or the like. For 3D printer controllers, streaming media endpoints, software experiments that might screw up the host so you don't want them on a machine you care about, and that sort of thing, they're a decent choice.

The usual 'just get an old thinkpad' advice still applies IMO.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=thinkpad&_sac...

Best value is always an ebay Thinkpad. But if you insist on buying new, the Lenovo Ideapad 3 Chromebook is $100 and often discounted down to $80. It's a 4GB/64GB eMMC/Gemini Lake n4020 with a TN screen. But it does have a good keyboard relative to its price range, and feels pretty solid. Battery life is about 8 to 10 hours.

The codename for this Chromebook is "Lick" and MrChromebox has alternative firmware which will allow Linux to be installed. I haven't done it on mine yet, but the instructions aren't difficult. I've read that most things on Linux will work automatically but there's a problem with sound out-of-the-box. There's a script on Github that supposedly fixes that.

https://mrchromebox.tech/

https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio

Chromebooks do not offer full UEFI implementations. Be sure to check options here before buying: https://mrchromebox.tech/

after my "Tuxedo computer" laptop is reaching its EOL (due to issues with the power-supply) I wanted to treat myself with something similar. Turns out that CLEVO supplies most of these vendors (System76, Tuxedo, etc). In fact system76 [1] "darter pro 9" seems equivalent to Clevo "NS50AU" model [2] - so getting coreboot to work is finally a reality. the only issue I have with system76 is that I'm unable to get it with an ISO keyboard. So ordering directly from CLEVO I hoped solves it.

Only downside that I'm now finding out the hard way, is that CLEVO is unresponsive wrt support questions. The machine has been paid in advance a while ago and was supposed to ship within 10 days. looking at their google reviews I'm not the only one who has this issue. Nobody picks up the phone, emails aren't answered etc. According to the reviews some simply don't get their goods at all and have to take legal action.

[1] https://system76.com/laptops/darp9/configure

[2] https://clevo-computer.com/en/laptops-configurator/processor...

coreboot with heads: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html?highlight=heads

I found an Edgar class one for $20 on Craigslist, all aluminum case. Looking for something like that would be the way to go. Every Chromebook has a 'name' and with that one can look up the support under stock Linux.

The problem is the hardware has really terrible resilience. Two years max.