[ale] hacking the Acer chromebook 13

[Jim Kinney]

I tried it but the reboot was a total fail - long beeps and no exit other
than power off and run a recovery install. May need to retry if there's
been an update to crouton.

On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Ted W. <ted-lists at xy0.org> wrote:

> No Crouton? https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
>
> Some discussion floating around the github "issues" say it works fine
> assuming you got the CB5 model (which it sounds like it is from your
> description).
>
>
> On 11/07/2014 12:26 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>> Got one of these beasties. It has the NVidia Tegra K1 cpu with 192 cuda
>> cores and quad 64-bit arm cpu, amazing power efficiency and a 1080p 13"
>> screen that's rather decent for less than $400.
>>
>> Now for the challenge, get a non-chromeOS Linux distro to run on this
>> thing.
>>
>> Not that the shipping chromeos is bad. It's not. OK. It's actually pretty
>> nice for what it does.
>>
>> BUT...
>>
>> It has no VPN support for the SSL thing used at work. It does support
>> IPSEC
>> and OpenVPN but not the F5 Big IP thing.
>>
>> The chrome browser dropped support for mozilla plugin api so the spice
>> client browser plugin is now DOA.
>>
>> Yeah. The two things I was specifically planning to use - vpn from
>> anywhere
>> to get to work-based VM over a spice connection for a near live-feel full
>> desktop environment.
>>
>> bummer
>>
>> The system has a TPM that will block running a non-google signed kernel
>> unless it's in developer mode. Easy enough to get into (and a nice
>> security
>> feature is going into developer mode from trusted mode wipes all user data
>> out - no password leakage - and the user space is all encrypted anyway).
>> Entering dev mode effectively turns off the TPM.
>>
>> The recover image installs onto a USB thumb drive and uses some very
>> strange partitioning:
>> GPT with a EUFI support partition plus another 11 partitions!
>> parted reports errors in the formatting of the thing but the unit is happy
>> with it.
>> The process uses a partition called KERN-A and ROOT-A, KERN-B and ROOT-B
>> for supporting a current version of kernel and filesystem plus a backup or
>> newly upgraded version.
>>
>> The system supports 3 pairings of this so there's room for a different
>> filesystem. I've seen some notes on using those extra partitions (on the
>> SSD, not on the thumb drive recovery device) to allow dual booting in
>> other
>> hardware (older chromebooks). Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 have support for
>> the Tegra K1 on the Jetson board (kernel 3.10+). That's a development
>> board
>> that's pretty much the same thing as the Acer mainboard except the Acer
>> has
>> no serial port. :-( and uses soldered-on SSD and RAM.
>>
>> I need to be able to extract the weird setting from the recovery image
>> partitioning so I can recreate them with new data bits. And this is where
>> I
>> get to learn more stuff.
>>
>> Note: I intend to keep the google kernel (maybe) as it has good hardware
>> support for the system but use my own filesystem tree so I can add firefox
>> and toys for other needs. I have a 32 GB SSD (and 4GB DDR3 RAM :-) so
>> space
>> is not to shabby.
>>
>> Ideas are welcome for reading partition data. I'll post what I see from
>> this later.
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
> --
> Ted W. <ted at xy0.org>
>
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>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain


*http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
<http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/>*
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