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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

> The “news” section shows the last release was in 2019.

I noticed this too... is this project dead?

> Flash the bios with mr chromebox firmware...

I had not heard of this path before; is it a one-way trip to load linux on a Chrome OS device this way or can it be reverted to factory settings (when it's time to pawn the device off on someone else)?

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I've never actually done this, but the process of flashing the firmware prompts you to back up the original firmware and I'm pretty sure you can just put it back on

My experience with this, and I'll stress that I'm sure it varies by device, is that using the Mr. Chromebox firmware to install GalliumOS works great, until you allow the device to be put to sleep or run out of battery. Then the firmware is restored to the original, without any user request.

This blocks you from booting your Linux environment again but is otherwise non-destructive (you can just run Mr. Chromebox again to get the necessary firmware re-installed)

(My device is a HP Chromebook 14")

Did you do the full firmware replacement or just the legacy boot slot? I have one of the early Acer Chromebooks and saw warnings about similar behavior if you did just the legacy slot, but if you open the case and remove the write protect screw and flash a full firmware, you wouldn't have any change when you run out of battery.

I was under the impression that is not an option on the Chromebook 14" from HP. But I have never disassembled the thing, so if there is a write-protect screw in there, I won't have seen it anyway...

I don't really mind, it doesn't harm the secondary partition at all, (it's more annoying that it cannot restore from sleep, than what happens if I forget to honor the fact that it cannot go to sleep properly...)

I could configure it so that it just won't go to sleep, but I'd rather have to run a script and restore the functioning firmware, than wake up to a chromebook with completely drained battery (and whatever filesystem corruption might come after ceasing writes to the filesystem in the middle of whatever happens due to an abrupt loss of power and when it's not "going to sleep" at the time.)

Ok I looked around, and there's several models of 'HP Chromebook 14', the earliest model has a screw, but the rest of them have a security device CR50 which you can unlock with a special debugging cable and a procedure which might be more trouble than it's worth ;)

I think it's kind of neat the way that it fails. It would be very easy for someone to accidentally poof and it's been factory reset if they didn't know how to handle this. I'm talking four mis-keystrokes easy. And a puzzle to solve in case it has fallen into the wrong hands? Sign me up, I guess!

I miss updates from GalliumOS, I guess it's time to move on, but I don't know if I could ever get all of the nice comfort features they built into their distro to be fully replicated on any other modern Linux distro of any kind that isn't specially focused on being a Linux distro for Chromebooks, like Gallium was!

I think they recommend just using normal Ubuntu now that most of the drivers have been upstreamed.

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