December Days 2021 #30: George Is An Excellent Netbook

[silveradept]

[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]

• CPU: Intel Atom N455 @ 1.66 GHz


• Memory: 2 GB RAM


• Graphics: Intel integrated graphics, resolution 1200x800


• Sound: Intel integrated sound, stereo through speakers or 3.5mm jack

Inputs/Peripherals: Keyboard, Multi-touch touchpad, 15-pin VGA output, 1x USB 2.0 port, SD/SDHC Card slot, IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1

• Storage: 16 GB solid state drive (SSD)


• OS: Chrome OS 65 → GalliumOS → Lubuntu 19.10, 20.04, 20.10, 21.04


I have saved my very best story of making old things work again for this, the next to last entry of this series. It contains all the things that make for a good technology story, involving careful research, occasional frustration, hardware modification through the use of carefully applied tape, and a satisfactory conclusion to the entire affair that allows a machine that long since stopped receiving updates to continue being a useful and updated computer in this day and age.

Chrome OS is a project that's designed to showcase just how much someone can do with a web browser, because that's basically what's running under the hood. Most extensions written for Chrome the browser (or Chromium, its open source version) work perfectly fine in Chrome OS, so the owner of the Chromebook essentially gets a device that is only really vulnerable to something that comes in through the browser itself or through a malicious or corrupted extension, which most people will hopefully not encounter. Chromebooks and Chrome OS is heavily marketed toward the primary and secondary school education market, where connectivity is likely to be ubiquitous and unlimited in bandwidth while on campus. For school systems that are concerned about putting a general purpose computing device in the hands of their small children, the Chromebook offers the solution of a lower-powered and more locked down device for educational needs. For schools or workplaces who already do most of their work in cloud computing environments, the Chromebook offers the ability to do work or schooling anywhere there's an Internet connection. (At least, in theory. I've had a lot of trouble getting Chromebooks to play nicely with the captive portal that's been deployed on the library's wireless access points. That I feel those captive portals are unnecessary and a barrier to access is a completely separate rant, where I let out my likely misguided belief that we put them in place because of copaganda about what our networks were being used for.)

I, personally, have found Chrome OS to be very limiting in what it can do, and that it requires an Internet connection for most of its apps and extensions to work correctly. More recent versions of Chromebooks for Android integration, so those Chromebooks have access to all the same kind of applications that Android phones and tablets do. Chromebooks also have the capability of installing a Linux system alongside Chrome OS, although this requires enabling the developer mode on the Chromebook, which will wipe any data and apps already present on the system. Like so many things when it comes to Google, these decisions are best made as the first thing you do to a new device so that you don't have to back everything up and then reinstall it after the service is done wiping itself for security purposes.

It turns out that my current partner obtained one of the original Cr-48 Chromebook pilot devices, the notebooks that were meant to showcase what a Chromebook could be and how Chrome OS would work. George (the Cr-48's name) had been an excellent Chromebook for them as they used it, but it had not been looked at in some time. Those pilot computers were available in 2010 or so, so by the time I got my hands on it to see what I could do with it, official updates had stopped coming through for the device (so it was stuck on Chrome 65, when the current Chrome was in the 80s), which is what prompted the green light to go ahead and see what I could do about it. Cue the research phase, where I discovered applications like crouton, which installs a lightweight Ubuntu into the system and makes it possible to switch back and forth between Chrome OS and Ubuntu. (And also gives you plenty of warnings about how you're not in their preferred environment, you developer you, wouldn't you like to go back to our walled garden where it's safe?) The recommended Linux to use, my research suggested, was GalliumOS, built by people who specifically tune and optimize their Linux to the Chromebook's hardware and patch some of the difficult things involved with it. Gallium offers their Linux as a side-along installation for those who want to keep their Chrome OS/Android capabilities, but also as a total conversion for those whose devices have fallen out of the update cycle or who obtained a Chromebook with the idea of transforming it into a lightweight Linux machine. (Some of the newer models that are on ARM processors instead of Intel ones don't get GalliumOS support as a total conversion, but may be able to install side-along.)

GalliumOS didn't officially support the Cr-48, which would normally be the end of the story, except on their wiki, they point out that one specific version of the Cr-48 does have the capability to run Linux, through the use of a custom firmware and BIOS available specifically for that version. The website that they linked to for three prices, however, had been wiped from the Internet, as wikispaces no longer existed as a place to put stuff. Supremely valuable knowledge for the few people who actually use it and need it, gone because the hosting for it disappeared. What to do now? Metaphorically speaking, at this point you light a candle and pray to the gods of Web history and hope you will be rewarded. Since I had a URI, it was time to take it to the place where much of the forgotten Internet resides - the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. And I got lucky - the spiders had crawled the entire site and saved a complete snapshot before it had disappeared! So I downloaded the entire site to my machine. Because it has been a wiki-type site, though, trying to open it in a web browser meant there was a lot of code that was trying to call out to that part of the Internet that no longer existed. Rather than fight the code and remove everything that wasn't part of the Internet any more, for all the pages that were offered, there was a second option for navigation, using a text editor and the wikitext files that were much more easy to read. And I could follow along with the pictures when they were referenced that showed where all the things were that I could look forward to seeing. Most crucially, however, the sure also had a local copy of the specific BIOS that I would need to flash to George so as to stop it from being a Chromebook and instead to transform it into a normal Intel netbook. Without all of these things present and together, and the Internet Archive capturing all of them, this project would not have been able to proceed, so bless you, person who archived all that information in their site, and bless you, webcrawler that got it all for the Internet Archive.

Having finally obtained the useful information that I would need to engage in the proper conversion of the Cr-48, it was time to actually do the thing. Which was going to involve opening up the device and disabling the write-protection for the BIOS space. It took me a good long while to find where the Developer Mode hardware switch was on the Chromebook, despite the being very clear pictures for where it should be, because, as it turns out, the hardware switch was covered by a piece of electrical tape that blended in extremely well with the rest of the Cr-48 chassis. There even was a picture included that showed the tape spot that would need to be removed, but I didn't understand it well enough to get the significance. Once I discovered the tape and removed it, the switch presented itself immediately. Switch flipped to Developer Mode while the system was off, excellent. And then we went at it with the screwdriver to get the casing off the underside, showing all of those lovely circuit boards, chips, and drives inside. There was a nice picture of all the screws that would need to be removed once the battery had been taken out, and another picture that pointed out the prize that I was looking for - the place on the board that would have to be covered so as to disable the write protection and begin the real process. Conveniently, one of the things that could be used to achieve this goal was a piece of electrical tape, much like the one that I had just removed to access the Developer Mode switch.

With the protection covered and the Developer switch flipped, I reassembled everything and turned in the machine to begin the software portion of the exercise. In Developer Mode, ChromeOS offers a limited terminal interface for screwing around with the system's internals, called crosh (Chrome Shell), that would be my way of getting in. With the correct BIOS in hand, I made a backup of the original system, even though I have no intention of ever letting it be a Chromebook again, and then did the necessary terminal commands to flash the system with the new BIOS. A reboot later, and I had an Intel BIOS to quickly configure so that it would boot to the flash drive containing GalliumOS on it for the total conversion installation. Which also worked appropriately! I had a proper Linux system running on a Chromebook, after several delicate operations that could have blown up in my face if I hadn't followed the directions correctly. Some of the ability to do those things came from the familiarity with the terminal that I'd developed, both as a Child of DOS and from running Linux systems that demand terminal familiarity for basic system operations like running updates. Some of it was bolstered by having successfully flashed new operating systems to other devices by following their instructions. And some of it was knowing this was a device that if it got bricked, then there wasn't anyone who was going to lose their primary computing device.

GalliumOS, as it turned out, was not actually the right OS for George, since there had never been any actual official support for the Cr-48 from them. There wasn't any reason to run it over any other form of lightweight Linux, and the Gallium people suggested using something like Lubuntu for the system, which would work better and probably have less weirdnesses involved from the GalliumOS optimizations for systems that came out much later than the Cr-48. So I grabbed a Lubuntu live image, right at the point where they made the transition to LxQt as the primary desktop Environment, I believe, and installed it over GalliumOS. That also went perfectly fine, and now George is an Excellent Netbook, which I can keep updated and running a very modern operating system on. I use George mostly for the same things I would have used a Chromebook for, to browse the web, but I can also use it for text composition, document editing, playing 2048 poorly, and a number of other things, so long as I remember that I don't have a lot of storage space on it, and there's not a lot of support for video intensive applications, so I couldn't use it as a satellite device for Steam streaming.

I'm extremely proud of having pulled this one off, even though it involves more of my research skills to find the thing, examine the documentation and files, and follow the directions provided than it did any sort of intensive hardware hacking or accidental discovery. George has been happily helping me compose things like this series, or the Suck Fairy's Greatest Hits, and making it ergonomically better for me to do long sessions of typing without having to turn on the big screens, or to have something else going on using the big screens while I do stuff on the smaller one. George might become my secondary machine to do things like conversion of PDFs into useful files if and when Pyrrha finally gives up at work. And with a 64-bit processor inside, it means George is immensely easier to keep updated (and to change distributions, should it become necessary) than Pyrrha is.

There's one more device to go on this trip through computing, and it's the most recent addition to the household.