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Booting you OS on an HP Chomebook

Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2013 12:44 pm
by rdos
It seems like there is a new series of notebooks without Windows licenses, and with quite reasonable flash discs and ChromeOS installed that would fit perfectly to modify to use RDOS instead.

It appears that the Chromebook uses coreboot, which is kind of an BIOS (not UEFI, thankfully). Coreboot itself can use for instance SeaBIOS or GRUB2 payloads, both which would be able to load RDOS. OTOH, the description of coreboot is cryptical, and there seems to be ways to lock things down so you cannot boot anything else than what the machine manufacturer intended.

Anybody tried to boot their OS on a chromebook (especially on HPs pavilion)? Did it work?

Re: Booting you OS on an HP Chomebook

Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2013 11:06 am
by Brynet-Inc
Like most Chromebooks, they make you jump through some hoops to boot anything else on them.. hooray trusted computing nonsense.

The process is even more involved for this model, you have to remove a ton of screws and then pry off the keyboard.

I wouldn't buy one, it's developer hostile.

Re: Booting you OS on an HP Chomebook

Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2013 2:06 pm
by rdos
The more I read about these machines the worse it gets. This is really going to give Linux and free software (ChromeOS is a Linux clone) a bad name.

Why the hell couldn't they just have provided a BIOS/UEFI/GRUB2 interface to this mess and support sane multiboot? It appears that the best you will be able to achieve is an error screen where a space will completely erase all your data, and CTL-D is required to boot your own OS of choice!

Then we have lots of articles about booting Ubuntu, which more or less is useless since it is another Linux system. When people ask about Windows boots, they will get no help.

I've decided I'd rather give away money to MS for a license than buying this pile of s**t.

Re: Booting you OS on an HP Chomebook

Posted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 11:02 am
by Jprogrammer
I can't even program in assembly or C++ on a ChromeBook!