Custom coreboot firmware and firmware utilities for your Chromebook/Chromebox | Hacker News Reader

Custom coreboot firmware and firmware utilities for your Chromebook/Chromebox

mrchromebox.tech

56 pointsthunderbong9 comments

This is great firmware in my experience. If you find or have an old unused Chromebook that it supports then it makes a perfect little Linux laptop.

We used ThinkPad X131e Chromebooks with this firmware as our launch fleet for our on-premises app. (We needed basic user-facing kiosks that could take a beating.)

Sadly I've procrastinated to do that, then suddenly the internal storage of my Chromebook died, and now it's stuck in endless "ChromeOS missing" without any way to flash it with something else.

I had that issue and what you need to do is either fully restore ChromeOS by burning a restore USB stick (Mac/windows follow these steps: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/1080595?hl=en or on Linux can run this script: https://dl.google.com/dl/edgedl/chromeos/recovery/linux_reco... ). Then once you have chrome os back you can get it in developer mode, unlock the firmware, etc (mrchromebox has instructions).

Alternatively you can use gallium OS' fix flags USB recovery stick as an alternative to restoring chrome os: https://galliumos.org/fixflags/README and the images https://galliumos.org/fixflags/ ). This acts like a chrome os restore stick but instead of reinstalling chrome os it flips on the legacy bios bits so you can install a Linux OS and then run mrchromebox's firmware flash.

Ultimately you'll need to fix your internal drive though to get something you can install onto first. You might go the official ChromeOS restore stick approach just to get it all back into a known good state, then experiment with blowing away the firmware to replace with coreboot.

It's in developer mode, but the MMC is probably dead : the restoration fails with some "unknown error". I could give the Gallium OS fixflag recovery a try, though!

I don't really care about the internal drive; I could probably use the SD card slot to host an OS instead.

I have a Dell Chromebook 11 that I bought off eBay for $30. It was locked to an enterprise management policy, however I was able to unenroll it (without using Sh1mmer, which wouldn't have worked anyway since there was no leaked RMA shim). Developer mode was disabled by policy. However, to get around this, I downloaded the earliest possible Chrome recovery image for the board (kefka) which dated to 2017, from chrome100.dev. I removed the RW protect screw from the board, and then used the out of date recovery image to recover the laptop, after which I was able to force it into developer mode without the management policy kicking in. I subsequently installed MrChromebox's UEFI firmware, which installed coreboot, and then booted from my Linux USB.

I have an Edgar chromebook that runs Ubuntu thanks to these UEFI images. It is my sons firdt computer....

This project is beyond awesome, but keep in mind that HW support also boils down to kernel and OS support. E.g. Audio support is still a mixed bag and only started (partially) working with the latest update.

We are building a video wall using a recycled Chromebook fleet and this Firmware Utility Script is invaluable for us. It works really well.

I have an Asus chromebox running this which has been solid as a rock for many years now.

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