[ale] hacking the Acer chromebook 13

[Chuck Payne]

The partition sound like what the Mac uses to do back in before 10.x, they
had like 9 partitions.  I thought there was a dip switch that lets you
install something on those chrome boxes. I guess hitting a site with SSH +
VNC is out.

On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 12:26 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>


-- 
Terror PUP a.k.a
Chuck "PUP" Payne

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