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Comment by stackghost

19 hours ago

Those original Chromebook Pixels were awesome machines.

I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.

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stackghost

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tgma  19 hours ago

You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.

  • bsammon  18 hours ago

    When I was actively hacking my chromebook, there was tons of advice like this, and 90% of it didn't work on both arm and intel-based chromebooks, and the advice-givers never mentioned which category it worked on. Sometimes it was buried 5 paragraphs into the webpage you were sent to for downloads, sometimes not.

    Has any of this changed?

    Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.

    • tgma  18 hours ago

      I was talking about a specific device on a specific dimension brought up by the GP, i.e., "freedom to tinker for the owner while preserving security for the masses." Whether that became a standardized process is a different story. By and large it has changed across models, but nevertheless it was a good balance of ownership/hackability without compromising security that can be emulated by other devices if they choose to.