toshiba_chromebook_2

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toshiba_chromebook_2 [21.11.2014 14:11] Pascal Sutertoshiba_chromebook_2 [14.08.2017 23:50] (current) – [Sound] Pascal Suter
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 one thing though makes the notebook almost unusable.. chromeos :) at least for me.. it heavily depends on being connected to the internet and this at least in my case is not always given.. i often use my notebook in a datacenter at a customers where i can't simply plug it into the network and get access.. or on an airplane etc. plus despite being a gmail user i don't consier myself a heavy cloud user.. but i am a fulltime linux user and that's where the chromebook gets interesting.. it's one of the only notebooks available in stores that run a pre installed linux kernel.. and thanks to crouton it's quite easy to get a fully capable linux environment running on it.. i had this notebook running with standby working and everything an far less time than many regular windows notebooks..  one thing though makes the notebook almost unusable.. chromeos :) at least for me.. it heavily depends on being connected to the internet and this at least in my case is not always given.. i often use my notebook in a datacenter at a customers where i can't simply plug it into the network and get access.. or on an airplane etc. plus despite being a gmail user i don't consier myself a heavy cloud user.. but i am a fulltime linux user and that's where the chromebook gets interesting.. it's one of the only notebooks available in stores that run a pre installed linux kernel.. and thanks to crouton it's quite easy to get a fully capable linux environment running on it.. i had this notebook running with standby working and everything an far less time than many regular windows notebooks.. 
 +
 +It turns out that the chrooted crouton wasn't satisfying after all as some stuff was not working and it was just too tedious to work with. so my chomebook sat in the cellar for a while. i recently researched again and found that the chromebook's firmware lock had been found and that it is now possible to disable it and flash a new bios which then enables you to install whatever you want on the little device. 
 +
 +====== The new solution ======
 +in short, this is what i have done: 
 +  * disable bios flash lock
 +  * flash [[https://mrchromebox.tech/|MrChromebox]] full blown bios image
 +  * install ubuntu-gnome from a usb stick like on any other pc
 +  * fix some issues
 +===== bios flash lock =====
 +in order to flash the bios you need to disable the hardware lock.. this is very simple once you know where to look :) .. simply remove the 8 screws on the underside of the chromebook, then remove the two rubber feet which are further away from the hinges and remove the two additional screws from there. open up the cover starting from the hinges and then remove the large silver shield that is held in place with 6 screws. underneath of screw nr. 5 you will see a silver washer-like sticker on the mainboard whichcovers two copper contacts. remove that sticker, put some electrical tape over those two half-circles on the board and reassemble everything. you can leave screw 5 away. 
 +now your bios is no longer write protected and you can go ahead and follow the instructions on mrchromebox.tech
 +===== fix some issues =====
 +i wanted to use ubuntu-gnome, so i simply installed it like i would on any other notebook. there is however [[https://galliumos.org/|Gallium OS]] which is based on Xubuntu and runs out of the box on the chromebook as it already includes fixes for all possible problems. so in order to avoid fixing anything you can simply use that. however, since i wanted gnome and not xfce and since the disk space is rather limited, i did not siply stick to gallium and then install the ubuntu-gnome-desktop package but tried to fix the issues i had with ubuntu-ghome. 
 +==== Sound ====
 +the sound card in the toshiba chrombeook 2 with Bay Trail cpu is a max98090 chip which does not seem to be supported. 
 +there is a [[https://launchpad.net/~albaguirre/+archive/ubuntu/linux-bytmax98090|PPA repository by Alberto Aguirre]] that looks promising. 
 +
 +i have installed his repo and then added some apt preferences to keep the kernel at an older version in order to stay with the patched one from aguirre: 
 +
 +# cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/pinKernel
 +Package: linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic linux-restricted-modules-generic
 +Pin: version 4.10.0-30
 +Pin-Priority: 1001
 +
 +==== Keyboard remapping ====
 +the keyboard needs remapping in order to get the multimedia keys to work. 
 +
 +
 +
 +====== The old solution ======
 +here follows my original post from just after i bought the chromebook just for reference.. i wasn't happy in the end with this setup and never really used my chromebook.. 
 +
 +
  
 there is a second possibility called chrubuntu which aims at installing a directly bootable ubuntu running a patched ubuntu kernel rather than the chromeos kernel.. however this solution did not work for the toshiba chromebook 2 at the moment of wrinting because right now this chromebook does not support legacy boot which wold be needed for that.. there is a possibility to boot into chrubuntu with a few commands in chromeos, however the author describing this solution did not get the sound card nor the standby functionality running so far and i don't see any advantage so far over runnign crouton which runs ubuntu in its own chroot environment with everyting working flawlessly..  there is a second possibility called chrubuntu which aims at installing a directly bootable ubuntu running a patched ubuntu kernel rather than the chromeos kernel.. however this solution did not work for the toshiba chromebook 2 at the moment of wrinting because right now this chromebook does not support legacy boot which wold be needed for that.. there is a possibility to boot into chrubuntu with a few commands in chromeos, however the author describing this solution did not get the sound card nor the standby functionality running so far and i don't see any advantage so far over runnign crouton which runs ubuntu in its own chroot environment with everyting working flawlessly.. 
  • toshiba_chromebook_2.txt
  • Last modified: 14.08.2017 23:50
  • by Pascal Suter