800+ IT
News
als RSS Feed abonnieren📚 I'm running Debian Bullseye Plasma on a chromebook
💡 Newskategorie: Linux Tipps
🔗 Quelle: reddit.com
TL,DR: Debian Bullseye is working on my Chromebook Asus C300 Bay Trail QUAWKS - soundcard almost working out of the box.
Background: there's a fair number of chromebooks and chromeboxes that reached end of ChromeOS support and a fair number of chromeb* owners unhappy with ChromeOS.
Here below I share my experience in re purposing an Asus C300 Bay Trail QUAWKS Intel Celeron N2840 (2 cores) @ 2.582GHz 4GB RAM 32GB soldered internal storage. In my opinion installing a Linux distro on them is a good way to promote Linux and to reduce e-wastes.
Suggestions for improvements to what I did and questions are very welcome.
I totally removed ChromeOS and eventually I'm running Debian Bullseye Plasma desktop, after a bunch of experiments.
First of all, I needed to flash a new firmware on my rig: I removed the write protection screw, I enabled the Developer mode and I ran the MrChromebox firmware utility script - it is possible to run it on Linux too, USB live systems included, if there're restrictions passing iomem=relaxed as kernel parameter at boot should work.
After that step my rig was ready for a full operating system installation.
The obvious choice has been GalliumOS, a Linux distro fine tuned for chromeb*: currently they are offering the version 3.1, based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and sporting Xfce 4.12 - you can install 9 different ISOs, each one of them dedicated to a different architecture, including Bay Trail. The kernel is 4.19 patched.
The installation process has been smooth (it's Ubiquity). After reboot around 0.5% cpu workload, 400MB RAM used and I had about 5GB out of 32GB of internal storage used.
I experienced internal sound card issues: speaker / headset volume levels too low and internal mic / headset mic not working, plus some crackling/muting when using the sound mixer utility (pastray).
By the way, the HDMI was working fine.
I removed pastray (I used the standard Xfce volume applet instead) and I modified the HiFi.conf in /usr/share/alsa/ucm/chtmax98090/ (the sound card is an Intel chtmax98090) to fix the issues.
I successfully removed Xfce and installed a minimal Plasma from Ubuntu Bionic official repos, requiring around 70MB more of RAM after boot and remaining snappy.
Big shut out for the GalliumOS team!
I tried and install Ubuntu Mate 18.04.4, however I wasn't able to make the internal sound work by adding the appropriate ucm folder/config files in place.
Next tentative has been Debian, which I was happily running for quite sometime (at that time stable was Jessie IIRC) .
No way to make a netinst: by providing the nonfree firmware needed I was able to connect, but the installation was failing during package fetching phase; I guess this is due to the latency of my connection (I live in a rural area, I'm connected by LTE).
I was able to install Buster (10.3) from the DVD1, no internal sound card detection after reboot.
I added the ucm folder and files, of course with my modifications - the original config files are available here on GitHub. The sound card was detected but not working (Ubuntu Mate was the same).
I added to my sources.list buster-backports and I installed the newest kernel available (5.4) from there: after reboot my sound card was working well.
In order to use sandboxed AppImages (I use Joplin for note taking) , I needed to enable user namespaces in kernel as follows:
su echo 'kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1' > /etc/sysctl.d/00-local-userns.conf exit I'm a desktop user: while I'm appreciating the rock solid stability of Debian stable, I'm suffering the age of the packages releases.
I updated LibreOffice from backports, I backported myself Olive Video Editor from unstable following this Debian wiki article - important: I wasn't able to download the sources as described in the section of the article Download the .dsc file from the sid release, I got the .dsc link from packages.debian.org and issued dget -x <url-of-dsc-file> without adding unstable sources.
Because the backporting experience has been time consuming, I decided to upgrade from stable to testing - no issues but few packages held back that required manual upgrade.
In Bullseye the alsa system is now using the UCM2 standard, which is detecting and working with my sound card out of the box with some issues: without my "old style" UCM files in place, therefore using UCM2 Debianoriginal config files, I'm experiencing sound crackling when changing output stream (e.g. plugging in headset jack), and the mics are apparently working, but the recorded sound isn't intelligible.
Fixes I found at present:
- with my old style UCM files in place the soundcard is working well, mics included - however this is a fallback workaround in my opinion;
- the stream switch on output is fixed by installing
pulseaudio-module-gsettingsand in the advanced audio settings tab checking the automatic output stream switch
Regarding the mics issue, I'm still searching around in the audio settings and I'm still trying to understand which config files are used by alsa for driving my card - I found this alsa ucm2 project and I'm reading the READMEs but til now nothing has enlightened me.
I'll update the post if I find a fix for the mics.
Debian proofed to me to be THE universal operating system once more!
Thank you for your long reading.
Cheers,
gabriel
[link] [comments] ...