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#76 2013-09-16 16:05:22

sadistic_angel
Member
Registered: 2013-05-04
Posts: 13

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

kdb424, how is the BIOS project coming along? i see you have windows booting, but the latest version of your C7 bios is untested, do you plan to test it? do you think suspend will work in that version? what are the symptoms when coming back from suspend? thanks.

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#77 2013-09-16 16:20:42

kdb424
Member
From: Pittsburgh PA, USA
Registered: 2013-05-26
Posts: 18
Website

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

It's tested. Suspend is broken, and the trackpad is broken on reboot (poweroff, wait a few seconds, and power on is fine. It works in general). I have been using it daily, and I'm sure that there is other ways around the suspend, but it just hangs upon suspend on arch, and hard reboots on fedora. He still has some work to do, but he needs more testers. If you don't need suspend, it's worth a flash to the most recent version. He needs more testers, and preferably experienced Arch users (or Linux users in general) as he could use logs and whatnot to help him fix stuff. Both him and I are very busy lately, so we have limited time. If others are willing to contribute, that would be great. Even if youjust spread the word, that could get other experienced devs to help, so don't think everyone can't help.

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#78 2013-09-18 14:10:45

MaxterTheTurtle
Member
Registered: 2013-04-13
Posts: 17

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

Hello, sorry it has been a while since I have posted. So, this time I'm having a bit of a problem. I can't unlock the bios for the Acer C7. I think I broke a pin or something on the jumper. No matter what metallic object I shove into the jumper, the block protection is still enabled. I've tried tinfoil to skrewdrivers. I'm honestly not sure what the problem is.

However, that isn't why I am here. Because I can't unlock the bios, I can't install the newest version of ArchLinux's kernel. I saw kdb424's post about updating the Kernel. I got really far in converting the script to something that ArchLinux can run. However, I am stuck on getting vbutil_kernel to work. It says that I am missing a lib file or where the lib file is pointing doesn't exist. (Its name eludes me right now.) However, I checked and the file actually exists and pacman uses it. So, I know that it is working.

So, I was wondering if anyone understands how to get vbutil_kernel working on ArchLinux. I know it works on Ubuntu, becuase Ubuntu has packages specifically for Chrome OS.

Thank You,
MaxterTheTurtle

Last edited by MaxterTheTurtle (2013-09-18 14:31:50)

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#79 2013-09-18 22:27:43

sadistic_angel
Member
Registered: 2013-05-04
Posts: 13

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

i'll update to the latest bios when i get my SSD in the mail so that i don't have to install chrome on it, now if i'm right i should install arch and get grub onto the SSD before installing into the C7 so that the bios can read the grub off of it.

when i update the bios will i get the latest kernel as well or will i need to upgrade that separately?

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#80 2013-09-19 01:53:16

kdb424
Member
From: Pittsburgh PA, USA
Registered: 2013-05-26
Posts: 18
Website

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

If you flash the latest, you should be able to boot arch from USB and install the same way as a normal PC (install any bootloader and install to HDD). Just boot SEABIOS not grub (the latest BIOS uses that by default)

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#81 2013-09-19 18:22:18

dots
Member
Registered: 2011-02-21
Posts: 18

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I went ahead and flashed my c7 with the custom bios. Had no problems with that. Only problem for me was my flash drive wouldn't boot any distro or windows. I believe the error message was "couldn't read the boot disk" or something like that. I used my android phone and was able to get arch booting and installed. I'd be happy to help with any needed logs and such.

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#82 2013-09-22 22:51:13

SomeoneE1se
Member
Registered: 2010-09-20
Posts: 51

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

dots wrote:

I went ahead and flashed my c7 with the custom bios. Had no problems with that. Only problem for me was my flash drive wouldn't boot any distro or windows. I believe the error message was "couldn't read the boot disk" or something like that. I used my android phone and was able to get arch booting and installed. I'd be happy to help with any needed logs and such.

You used your android phone how?

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#83 2013-10-04 04:34:39

sadistic_angel
Member
Registered: 2013-05-04
Posts: 13

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

kdb424 wrote:

If you flash the latest, you should be able to boot arch from USB and install the same way as a normal PC (install any bootloader and install to HDD). Just boot SEABIOS not grub (the latest BIOS uses that by default)

Ok so, like i said, i would try when my SSD came in, and indeed i did, it came today, i tested today, i can indeed boot from a flashdrive, but trying to boot arch it hangs at booting the kernel. i will try fedora and manjaro to see if i get the same effect.

EDIT1 Fedora: stuck at blinking underscore
EDIT2 Manjaro: manjaro boots perfectly without even the need for mem=1800

Last edited by sadistic_angel (2013-10-04 05:08:40)

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#84 2013-10-04 06:57:36

mzs114
Member
Registered: 2013-08-05
Posts: 3

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

sadistic_angel wrote:
kdb424 wrote:

If you flash the latest, you should be able to boot arch from USB and install the same way as a normal PC (install any bootloader and install to HDD). Just boot SEABIOS not grub (the latest BIOS uses that by default)

Ok so, like i said, i would try when my SSD came in, and indeed i did, it came today, i tested today, i can indeed boot from a flashdrive, but trying to boot arch it hangs at booting the kernel. i will try fedora and manjaro to see if i get the same effect.

EDIT1 Fedora: stuck at blinking underscore
EDIT2 Manjaro: manjaro boots perfectly without even the need for mem=1800

Glad to hear about booting Manjaro without any mods, But John and others reported that Fedora was working fine..
Hmm.. please post a comment here(details would help) -> http://johnlewis.ie/

Btw.. John is short of just 37 euros to get his hands on the C7.. when he does, we are hopeful of getting a proper binary.

Spread the word so others would be aware of this and will help the community at large. Hope the next Chromebooks will have provision to boot non-chromium kernel.. smile

Cheers!

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#85 2013-10-08 00:42:54

dots
Member
Registered: 2011-02-21
Posts: 18

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

SomeoneE1se wrote:
dots wrote:

I went ahead and flashed my c7 with the custom bios. Had no problems with that. Only problem for me was my flash drive wouldn't boot any distro or windows. I believe the error message was "couldn't read the boot disk" or something like that. I used my android phone and was able to get arch booting and installed. I'd be happy to help with any needed logs and such.

You used your android phone how?

I used this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta … roid&hl=en

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#86 2013-10-15 20:37:23

sadistic_angel
Member
Registered: 2013-05-04
Posts: 13

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

Has anyone tried BSD yet? I'll try installing it on my C710 when i get home, also is a bios for the C720 planned? if so i'll have to go out and buy one.

UPDATE: So, every attempt to get BSD onto the C710 has failed with "cannot read /boot/kernel/kernel" the file IS there, i have tried freeBDS, and dflyBSD, tried all dvd, cd and usb images (each writen to a flashrive) and tried different methods for writing, YUMI, unetbootin, dd, and iso to usb (for windows) none of which worked, so i'm thinking that i will not be able to get BSD onto my C710, sadly.

Last edited by sadistic_angel (2013-10-16 17:28:52)

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#87 2013-10-23 13:44:32

mrbadura
Member
Registered: 2013-10-23
Posts: 5

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I'm a little late to this, but I've been working on my C7 project for some time, i've finally got the closest thing to a legit Arch install possible. I had to use a bridgelinux installer to do so. for some reason I couldn't get Arch to boot after install. Has anyone else had this problem?

Interestingly enough, for anyone experiencing the kernel panic when attempting to boot to the Installer, if you add the tag "mem=1G" to the bootparams it boots without the error "not enough memory" ironically enough.

i'm running the http://johnlewis.ie/coreboot-c7-04092013.rom custom ROM

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#88 2013-10-23 14:21:21

sadistic_angel
Member
Registered: 2013-05-04
Posts: 13

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I am currently running manjaro, it didn't need any tinkering with boot commands.
i am currently on the latest rom http://johnlewis.ie/coreboot-parrot-gru … 102013.rom
i'm happy with most things about it, (mouse not working on some boots is a downer)
I want to boot BSD preferably freeBSD, but have not found a way to do so as of yet

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#89 2013-10-23 17:18:08

mrbadura
Member
Registered: 2013-10-23
Posts: 5

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

that's interesting, on my bridge install, the trackpad works OOB. the only thing it required was a second boot to the install media and then a reboot, i literally did nothing else. strangest thing.

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#90 2013-11-05 01:12:22

kdb424
Member
From: Pittsburgh PA, USA
Registered: 2013-05-26
Posts: 18
Website

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

sadistic_angel wrote:

I am currently running manjaro, it didn't need any tinkering with boot commands.
i am currently on the latest rom http://johnlewis.ie/coreboot-parrot-gru … 102013.rom
i'm happy with most things about it, (mouse not working on some boots is a downer)
I want to boot BSD preferably freeBSD, but have not found a way to do so as of yet

BSD should work if he fixes the rest of th crap to get windows to boot (mostly ACPI support). As for the no working trackpad, there is a bad hand-off of information. You have to do it from a cold boot or trackpad dies. Leave it powered off for at least 5 seconds before booting and trackpad always works. I was the original tester, and discovered that. It's a known issue as it's just a basic hack currently. Should work better in time now that he actually has one.

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#91 2013-11-05 14:22:49

mrbadura
Member
Registered: 2013-10-23
Posts: 5

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

kdb424 wrote:
sadistic_angel wrote:

I am currently running manjaro, it didn't need any tinkering with boot commands.
i am currently on the latest rom http://johnlewis.ie/coreboot-parrot-gru … 102013.rom
i'm happy with most things about it, (mouse not working on some boots is a downer)
I want to boot BSD preferably freeBSD, but have not found a way to do so as of yet

BSD should work if he fixes the rest of th crap to get windows to boot (mostly ACPI support). As for the no working trackpad, there is a bad hand-off of information. You have to do it from a cold boot or trackpad dies. Leave it powered off for at least 5 seconds before booting and trackpad always works. I was the original tester, and discovered that. It's a known issue as it's just a basic hack currently. Should work better in time now that he actually has one.

That makes more sense, booting live and rebooting must have given it the appropriate power down time to get a proper handoff. Thanks for the info!

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#92 2013-11-21 15:44:54

jlreid
Member
Registered: 2011-06-14
Posts: 3

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

Hey all,

I've been running an Arch 64-bit build on my acer C7 for some time now--somehow I managed to install it with less fuss than the wiki instructions but that's for later.  What I'm trying to do is update the kernel from 3.4.0 to 3.8.x but keep getting a toolchain error when using the instructions on the wiki discussion page.  Has anyone recently done this kernel update? I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

Thanks!



-J.L.

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#93 2013-11-29 12:13:52

iTz_Malevolence
Member
Registered: 2013-11-29
Posts: 2

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

Hey There

Been a long time lurker but never really bothered registering until today, so here goes first post. tongue
Thought I'd respond here seeing as I'm using Arch on my Chromebook C7. I've installed another 2GB of DDR3 and replaced its HDD with an old 60GB SSD from my main PC. Runs nice and snappy, perfect for uni work. smile
Anyway I was originally using ChrUbuntu and switched to Arch back in May or whenever I first saw this guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_C7_Chromebook
It was around the same time I started using Arch on my main rig as I moved from Linux Mint (thought I could do with going with an unstable/rolling release distro so I can learn how to fix things and get myself out of problems).

I kinda went away on a holiday and got back and wanted to play some movies on my chromebook and noticed then that the graphics performance was terrible. Not sure about this but I'd go to play a game like Minecraft for example and I'd get something like:

Gen6+ requires Kernel 3.6 or later.

Anyway figured I'd need to update my kernel as I was using 3.4.0 so I tried following the steps to compile kernel 3.8.11 as discussed on the wiki talk page. I got a couple of steps further than jlreid above with his problem:

jlreid wrote:

Hey all,

I've been running an Arch 64-bit build on my acer C7 for some time now--somehow I managed to install it with less fuss than the wiki instructions but that's for later.  What I'm trying to do is update the kernel from 3.4.0 to 3.8.x but keep getting a toolchain error when using the instructions on the wiki discussion page.  Has anyone recently done this kernel update? I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

Were you having a problem where it was compiling marking warnings as errors? I managed to get past that problem by changing -Werror to -Wno-error in the Makefile under CFLAGS.
Also I had to install i386 packages for libssl and libc6. Can't remember the names of those packages for Arch. See here: http://superuser.com/questions/583269/c … tead-3-4-0

Anyway, kernel compiled fine after that but I couldn't vbutil_kernel on the output, kept up coming up as an invalid file.
I got frustrated with the device after that and figured I'd go ahead and try and flash it with the coreboot supplied by John Lewis.
I supposed if I broke the device I guess I'd go ahead and buy a bus pirate and learn how to JTAG the device. (In first year Computer Engineering and Computer Science so I'd figured I should probably learn to do this).

Worked straight up and got SeaBIOS running on it. I'd recommend giving it a go if you are not worried about the risk of bricking the device (not sure if that's the right term as you can still fix it with the right tools), although in my frustration on trying to update the kernel I ended up loosing my Arch partition and used flashrom in Chrome OS.

Anyway all happy now and I've got Arch with the latest upstream kernel 3.12.1-3, when I installed a window manager (I like E17) I had problems with the touchpad simply not working.
I fixed this by adding the following modules:

cat /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf
loop
lp
i2c-i801
i2c-dev
chromeos-laptop
cyapa

And its all happy days. smile

Actually funny story about the device, a mate first bought it at the beginning of this year thinking he could install Windows 7 on it himself. He saw it was running an Celeron 847 and put two and two together thinking it'd just act like a normal laptop and usb boot a Windows installer. I've yet to convert him to use Linux instead but he ended up convincing me to buy it off him for $100. I needed a new laptop anyway for uni, so I took and thought I'd have a play around on it. Can't complain for the price. But I guess now I could sell it back to him seeing as its capable of doing what he originally wanted. But nah it's brilliant for my needs now.

Been seeing a few C710s pop up on ebay for around $100-$150, thinking of getting some and re-selling them to mates in my programming class with SeaBIOS and Arch and maybe with an SSD and a little more RAM.

TL;DR: Tried to update kernel by getting 3.8.11 to /dev/sda6, failed, got annoyed and flashed it with http://johnlewis.ie/coreboot-parrot-sea … 102013.rom and it worked perfectly. Essentially just another success story of using coreboot on the device.

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#94 2013-12-03 01:08:11

jlreid
Member
Registered: 2011-06-14
Posts: 3

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

@iTz_Malevolence

Thanks for your reply. I was able to successfully compile the kernel after changing the CFlag as you recommended. I was also able to get vbutil to create and verify the new package.  I think your problem--assuming you got the "Error reading kernel file" message--is that the script is looking for the new kernel in /boot.  So I changed the "--vmlinux" argument to "--vmlinux vmlinux" since the compiled kernel file was sitting in my current directory (/usr/src/kernel-next).

After that everything seemed fine except the resulting kernel is too large for my /dev/sda6 partition, which lsblk reports as 16M.  The current 3.4.x kernel is under 17M so the partition size is fine. I've tried recompiling the new kernel using localmodconfig, thinking that I was building it with way more device,etc. support than I needed. This, however only reduced the size ~ 400Kb. The latest build is still clocking in at 241.7M...

Do you mind sharing your compiled kernel size? I'm hoping I'm doing something wrong at this point, possibly with my kernel config, rather than being SOL because of my kernel partition size...



-JLR

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#95 2013-12-22 20:12:34

SomeoneE1se
Member
Registered: 2010-09-20
Posts: 51

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I'm about to finish up and release a script that will install Arch to the C7 without that whole ubuntu non-sense.

I'm torn between installing X and chromium, or doing nothing and leaving a super basic install (the arch way). It'd be no contest to leave it basic, but I've been thinking that anyone who would use this script (vs installing it themselves) would want to use X on the C7.

Thoughts?

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#96 2013-12-24 19:58:02

killerturtle
Member
Registered: 2010-11-12
Posts: 111

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I'm very interested in that script!

I'm running Ubuntu via Crouton for now on my C7, with upgraded SSD to 256GB (Crucial M4).

As for your question, yes with X and Chromium PLS!!

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#97 2014-01-05 23:25:36

SomeoneE1se
Member
Registered: 2010-09-20
Posts: 51

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I've got my script completed. I'm going to update the wiki next. Until that happens

(0) enable dev mode 
(1) connect to wifi
(2) login as chronos then su for root in tty2
(3) # wget https://raw.github.com/GrayHatter/archC7/master/installarch.sh
(4) # bash installarch.sh
(5) reboot and wait for chromeOS to repair itself
(6) repeat steps 1-3 
(7) done

If you use this script, let me know. Especially if you have problems/comments/solutions!

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#98 2014-02-08 03:18:21

omgwtfbyobbq
Member
Registered: 2006-07-04
Posts: 226

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

Thanks for the script! I'm getting a shared library error from pacman when it's installing packages.

/usr/bin/pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libgssapi_krb5.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Last edited by omgwtfbyobbq (2014-02-08 03:30:08)

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#99 2014-02-08 05:18:16

SomeoneE1se
Member
Registered: 2010-09-20
Posts: 51

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

omgwtfbyobbq wrote:

Thanks for the script! I'm getting a shared library error from pacman when it's installing packages.

/usr/bin/pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libgssapi_krb5.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Do you know when this appears? Before or after pacstrap runs?

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#100 2014-02-08 07:21:06

omgwtfbyobbq
Member
Registered: 2006-07-04
Posts: 226

Re: Acer C7 Chromebook

I think it's throwing that error once it gets to the install_packages() function in arch-bootstrap.sh. It's happening after it's done grabbing all those packages anyway.

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