Hey Paul (hey everyone), some more info regarding the Chromebooks. I just catched up with the discussion and learned, that it might be of special interest for you (regarding selling Debian notebooks, etc ;-).
Paul van der Vlis <[email protected]>, Mon 2014-11-24 00:42: > A SSD has it's own processor and firmware, and that's always non-free > so far I know. OK, I'm still assuming there is more chips in a modern computer which contain bits of non-free firmware. In case of the wireless chip it usually shows because the code is so big/complex/dynamic/idontknow, that the OS is expected to provide it. For the rest of the chipset I wouldn't put the hard disk at a special place. Obviously non-Free firmware is always bad, even when it doesn't affect your Free OS, I was just confused that this was pointed out for the SSD but for no other components. The article you linked to is pretty l33t ("installing Linux on my hard drive" made my day), though I still don't put the mass storage at a special place. > Interesting, so the Acer Chromebook C720. Do you have an exact > type-number of what you use? There is what seems to be a sub model number on the package: NX.SHEEG.001 I don't think that's important though. > There is a version with touchscreen too, > do you know more about it? My previous two laptops were convertibles and I noticed that I don't have much use for a touch screen, even though I like working with external graphic tablets. The touch screen version comes with almost no increase in price (maybe +10€) but it has one hour less battery run time, so I wasn't interested in it. The touch screen variant is *not* a convertible, the screen still has to stay in an upright position. > Do you know more of such Chromebook > devices what work fine with free distro's? Well, the ASUS chromebook looked very promising too, so my girlfriend got one of those. However she returned it a day later, as to her disappointment, the Coreboot didn't provide a SeaBIOS (the extension for enabling the legacy IBM boot) and thus installation of a common Linux- Distribution would have been tricky if at all possible. Aparently I got especially lucky with the C720. Though the entire Chromebook brand is promising. It is possible to build your own versions of Coreboot and replace the ROMs on existing Chromebooks. John Lewis [1] provides prebuild ROMs and flashing scripts which have the reputation of beeing very safe. There is currently no ROM for the ASUS Chromebook. I got another Acer C720 for one of my clients and learned the hard way, that with the stock ROM it is much too easy to accidentally reenable the OS verification when booting. Enabling OS verification with a Not-ChromeOS installed immediately renders the device unbootable until you insert a ChromeOS recovery medium, which will erase the hard disk in order to restore ChromeOS. After that, you can start over again. For this reason I recommend you flash the ROM of all Chromebooks before selling them with Debian. I'm going to do that as soon as I have an adapter to read the mSATA SSDs in case of emergencies. I'll probably hold one in my hands by the beginning of the year, and I'm going to keep you posted. > The Chromebook C720 is supported from Linux 3.17, but many people will > use an older kernel. This is much less of a problem than it first seems. The only device which is not supported with kernels prior to 3.17 is the tuchpad. Everything else works (I choose to not use the proprietary firmware image required for running the bluetooth adapter). There are Free kernel patches to make the touchpad work with older kernel versions as well, but I've decided to apt-pin a 3.17 kernel from Debian Experimental instead (my client is still using an external mouse, but I'm going to install the newer kernel there as well). I copied a couple of rc.local hacks from the web blog of another Fellow [2] to make suspend work (didn't check if that's still needed in 3.17, I actually use *only* the lines for rc.local). I haven't modified any settings for the touchpad. > And you get problems when the accu is really > empty because you cannot boot anymore: > https://blog.mdosch.de/2014/09/14/acer-chromebook-c720-legacy-boot-dau > erhaft-aktivieren/ I let my C720 die in suspend one time and didn't experience this. The fix described in this article might be a good alternative to flashing the ROM. I'd recommend one of the two anyways. The best thing about the Chromebooks: no matter what hacks you require to operate a GNU/Linux-Distribution on the devices, it seems there is no way at all of running Windows on the things! Yeah, how does *that* feel for a change? *gg [1] https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download/ [2] http://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/04/20/c720-debian/ -- Paul Hänsch █▉ Webmaster, System-Hacker █▉█▉█▉ Jabber: [email protected] ▉▉ Free Software Foundation Europe _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
