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Private Speech posted:How hard is it to work around the security of a locked-down educational chromebook? Modern Chromebooks all have a security microcontroller that features a TPM and serves as the root of trust. Short of any vulnerabilities in the controller firmware ("Cr50") there's no way to bypass enrollment blocks on these models. For non-enrolled devices though there's a special USB-C cable ("Suzy-Q") that you can use to interact with Cr50 to remotely flash the device. If you don't have one of these cables you can still reflash them by opening up the device and disconnecting the battery (power off AC). The thing about Chromebooks that makes them different from late 90s PC is that Google has very tight control over the hardware and the firwmare stack that runs on them. The good news is that they've used this control to require manufacturers to make all non-enrolled Chromebooks hackable, but also means that with Cr50 they have a very tight lock on enrolled devices too.
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Feb 10, 2022 16:13
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Are they just dancing around "old PCs ... no longer getting official updates" meaning old Chromebooks? My wife has a Windows 8-something laptop that still gets updates, while my Haswell hardware hasn't for nearly two years now. Of course, you could install UEFI on a Haswell machine and then this would probably work too, but still seems to be ignoring the elephant in the room.
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Feb 16, 2022 15:48
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Conversely the kind of Android apps you might actually want to use a keyboard and trackpad with might work fine? Buy a Chromebook at Micro Center*, try it, and if it's not to your liking powerwash it and return it. * or other local retailer with a reasonable open-electronics return policy** ** what do you mean retail is dead?
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Aug 18, 2022 13:51
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I've been using various Chromebooks since 2014 and never bought a Pixelbook. I prefer cheaper models as I don't really need the performance and I like something that I can easily replace. However, I have to give Google credit keeping a careful eye over OEMs such that pretty much any model out there has the same (key) layout and general physical characteristics, unlike the jank-rear end designs of the netbook era. I hope this group disbanding doesn't affect this oversight as Chromebooks are one of the very few products where pretty much anything in the $300-400 range is going to meet a baseline level of quality.
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Sep 15, 2022 18:55
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mystes posted:Honestly with the limitations of chromebooks I don't really see the point in getting a high end one anyway.
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Sep 16, 2022 01:39
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There's unofficial Coreboot UEFI builds for Chrome hardware out there, I'd imagine there would be the same for this without needing a mainboard swap.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:20
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mystes posted:However, at a certain point (and this is just my personal opinion that other people would probably disagree with) it doesn't feel like there's that much reason to be using ChromeOS then rather than Linux if you're mostly just using crostini (obviously you need to janitor Linux then but I've you're using crostini heavily enough you're doing that anyway). I also strongly disagree with the statement about having to janitor crostini. The main reason people have to janitor Linux is due to kernel/OS upgrades, which are needed for improved hardware support or security updates. Chrome OS takes care of the hardware support/security update aspect, so it doesn't really matter if the software you run via crostini is even a couple years out of date since the stuff people use it for isn't moving very quickly anyways.
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Sep 27, 2022 15:10
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mystes posted:It seems like the argument people keep making is that, yeah, theoretically you could be doing all this cpu/memory intensive stuff in crostini, therefore Chromebooks need good specs, but then when it comes down to how people actually use it it's always "I occasionally use the terminal to ssh into another computer." That said, I think the idea that if you reach a certain workload point you must be "janitoring" your system enough that you might as well go with a full-on Linux laptop is not necessarily accurate. There are folks who do work that require lots of CPU/memory resources but otherwise don't need to run the latest software. Crostini is a good system to do data analytics whether Python or R. Thing is, there's not tons of manufacturers of Linux laptops either. You have a few boutique manufacturers, the Dell XPS Developer Edition, and beyond that you're at the mercy of purchasing a Windows laptop and hope that you can run whatever Linux on it with minimal fuss--and that's really where all the janitoring goes.
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Sep 27, 2022 17:52
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Trip report: I tried Chrome OS Flex (the new CloudReady) on a 2015 Dell XPS that had been previously running Windows 8 and went all WARNING EOL WARNING. It went into a bootloop after installation, but I was able to get it to boot just enough to enable cros_debug run a dmesg. It turns out the stock SSD has broken TRIM support, not really a surprise for a 2015 SSD, so I got that replaced and now it works great. Given this was a top-of-the-line ultrabook for its time, I think it's pretty competitive performance-wise to new Chromebooks. The battery is in good condition too. I kind of want to resurrect my old Haswell Chromebox by installing UEFI and Flex on it. I have more modern hardware to do that with, but it seems appropriate to run a semi-official OS build on official, but EOL hardware.
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Nov 16, 2022 20:04
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Toalpaz posted:Anyone have any experience installing new OS's chromebooks? Chrome(ium) OS uses a custom boot procedure instead of a traditional BIOS and while all of the relevant code is opensource I'm not sure how much (if any) of it has been upstreamed in the Linux kernel, so I wouldn't necessarily expect a standard distro USB image to boot on a Chromebook out of the box. That said MrChromebox (see Atomizer's link) provides builds of Coreboot+Tianocore to provide UEFI support on many Intel Chromebooks. You'll have to disable firmware write protection (remove the write-protect screw, or on newer models use either a SuzyQ cable or unplug the battery) and flash the new boot firmware from developer mode. From there it should just boot a UEFI and you can boot your USB media as normal. Amusingly enough, this approach provides a "pretty darn opensource" firmware stack, relative to even Intel reference hardware.
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Feb 17, 2023 15:36
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 20:38 |
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So while I've bought two Chromebooks from Micro Center and have been happy with them both times (Samsung Chromebook 2, Lenovo Chromebook S340), these days they usually only have one or two models in store and not necessarily popular ones either.
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Jul 13, 2023 16:23
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