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toshiba_chromebook_2 [19.11.2014 05:01] – Pascal Suter | toshiba_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' | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====== The new solution ====== | ||
+ | in short, this is what i have done: | ||
+ | * disable bios flash lock | ||
+ | * flash [[https:// | ||
+ | * 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, | ||
+ | ==== 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:// | ||
+ | |||
+ | 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 / | ||
+ | Package: linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic linux-restricted-modules-generic | ||
+ | Pin: version 4.10.0-30 | ||
+ | Pin-Priority: | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==== 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.. | ||
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* now enable developer (important: this will erase all your local data and settings) mode in order to get root access to your chromeos: press and hold esc. and reload and then press the power button to reboot the chromebook into recovery mode. once you are in recovery mode, press ctrl+d to continue and then select to enable developer mode. this might take a moment. after that your notebook will reboot and you will see a warning that developer mode has been enabled. you can either wait 30seconds for it to boot or press ctrl+d once more to boot. | * now enable developer (important: this will erase all your local data and settings) mode in order to get root access to your chromeos: press and hold esc. and reload and then press the power button to reboot the chromebook into recovery mode. once you are in recovery mode, press ctrl+d to continue and then select to enable developer mode. this might take a moment. after that your notebook will reboot and you will see a warning that developer mode has been enabled. you can either wait 30seconds for it to boot or press ctrl+d once more to boot. | ||
* once rebooted, go through the setup wizard until you have a working internet connection and log in | * once rebooted, go through the setup wizard until you have a working internet connection and log in | ||
+ | ===== disable rootfs verification ===== | ||
+ | in order to get this to work i had to switch to the developer firmware first bz running this command as superuser in a command prompt: | ||
+ | chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode=todev | ||
+ | then reboot and disable rootfs verification (caution, whenever i ran this command a second time it somehow destroyed my crhome os and i had to recover from the usb stick! all settings where lost) | ||
+ | sudo / | ||
+ | reboot again | ||
+ | now whenever you want to change anyting on your root partition you can run | ||
+ | mount -o remount,rw / | ||
+ | to be able to writ to your root partition. this will be needed later on to autostart ubuntu and other stuff. | ||
+ | |||
===== install crouton ===== | ===== install crouton ===== | ||
* download [[http:// | * download [[http:// | ||
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* run crouton. at best you first look at the available command line options by running < | * run crouton. at best you first look at the available command line options by running < | ||
* this will install a ubuntu trusty 14.04 lts version with a basic gnome environment. as the script tells you you can now start your ubuntu by typing < | * this will install a ubuntu trusty 14.04 lts version with a basic gnome environment. as the script tells you you can now start your ubuntu by typing < | ||
- | ===== customize | + | ===== customize |
- | * you might want to install | + | * crouton installs a very minimalistic gnome desktop and not much else. in order for it to look pretty and to have all the gnome tools you might have gotten used to you need to install |
- | * i also recommend to install | + | |
===== autostart crouton ===== | ===== autostart crouton ===== | ||
- | | + | [[https:// |
+ | | ||
+ | * now download [[https:// | ||
+ | * make sure the parameters are matching your needs and installation | ||
+ | * touch a file called crouton.init in your downloads directory. | ||
+ | ===== simulate middle mouse button ===== | ||
+ | on a normal trackpad you would simply click the left and right mouse key at the same time to simulate a center key klick, but the chromebook has only one button. so this leaves us with the mac solution: tap the pad with one finger for a left click, two fingers for a right click and.. you might guess it.. three fingers for the center click... you can enable this by opening a command prompt and running this command < | ||
+ | chmod +x ~/ | ||
+ | </ | ||
===== sidenote: updating ubuntu ===== | ===== sidenote: updating ubuntu ===== | ||
- | if you need to update to a new releae simply use do-release-upgrade as youwould in any ubuntu installation.then log off and in chrome os run the crouton script to update its side of the installation: | + | if you need to update to a new releae simply use do-release-upgrade as youwould in any ubuntu installation.then log off and in chrome os run the crouton script to update its side of the installation: |
- | in oder to keep it that way even after the upgrad we need to rename the chroot name by running < | + | |
+ | ====== OpenVPN with config file ====== | ||
+ | chromeos comes with openvpn built in but it has a very limited gui which does not allow to use a config file and it does further not allow to use tls auth. but luckily it uses a standard openvpn binary behind the scenes, so that the binary can be called manually inorder to initiate the connection with a config file. | ||
+ | |||
+ | i have created a startup script that runs openvpn after iptables (and therefore the network) has been initiated. copy all certs and the config file to /home/vpn and name the configfile ovpn.conf | ||
+ | |||
+ | now copy paste this upstart script to / | ||
+ | < | ||
+ | author | ||
+ | |||
+ | start on started iptables | ||
+ | kill timeout 10 | ||
+ | |||
+ | task | ||
+ | |||
+ | script | ||
+ | openvpn --mktun --dev tun0 | ||
+ | openvpn --config / | ||
+ | end script </ |