[ale] hacking the Acer chromebook 13

[Jim Kinney]

Got one of these beasties. It has the NVidia Tegra K1 cpu with 192 cuda
cores and quad 64-bit arm cpu, amazing power efficiency and a 1080p 13"
screen that's rather decent for less than $400.

Now for the challenge, get a non-chromeOS Linux distro to run on this thing.

Not that the shipping chromeos is bad. It's not. OK. It's actually pretty
nice for what it does.

BUT...

It has no VPN support for the SSL thing used at work. It does support IPSEC
and OpenVPN but not the F5 Big IP thing.

The chrome browser dropped support for mozilla plugin api so the spice
client browser plugin is now DOA.

Yeah. The two things I was specifically planning to use - vpn from anywhere
to get to work-based VM over a spice connection for a near live-feel full
desktop environment.

bummer

The system has a TPM that will block running a non-google signed kernel
unless it's in developer mode. Easy enough to get into (and a nice security
feature is going into developer mode from trusted mode wipes all user data
out - no password leakage - and the user space is all encrypted anyway).
Entering dev mode effectively turns off the TPM.

The recover image installs onto a USB thumb drive and uses some very
strange partitioning:
GPT with a EUFI support partition plus another 11 partitions!
parted reports errors in the formatting of the thing but the unit is happy
with it.
The process uses a partition called KERN-A and ROOT-A, KERN-B and ROOT-B
for supporting a current version of kernel and filesystem plus a backup or
newly upgraded version.

The system supports 3 pairings of this so there's room for a different
filesystem. I've seen some notes on using those extra partitions (on the
SSD, not on the thumb drive recovery device) to allow dual booting in other
hardware (older chromebooks). Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 have support for
the Tegra K1 on the Jetson board (kernel 3.10+). That's a development board
that's pretty much the same thing as the Acer mainboard except the Acer has
no serial port. :-( and uses soldered-on SSD and RAM.

I need to be able to extract the weird setting from the recovery image
partitioning so I can recreate them with new data bits. And this is where I
get to learn more stuff.

Note: I intend to keep the google kernel (maybe) as it has good hardware
support for the system but use my own filesystem tree so I can add firefox
and toys for other needs. I have a 32 GB SSD (and 4GB DDR3 RAM :-) so space
is not to shabby.

Ideas are welcome for reading partition data. I'll post what I see from
this later.

-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain


*http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
<http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/>*
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