[ale] hacking the Acer chromebook 13

[JD]

I have only 2 questions.

            Does it have a DELETE key and where is the power key?




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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