↩ 012. Debian on the Lenovo 300e 2nd-gen arm64 Chromebook ↩
Mon, 08 Jan 2024 16:06:34 +0100
On 2024-01-04 I bought the titular laptop for 120+11.6zł (100+10zł sometimes available, 70+8.5zł for one with a busted-ass screen; resp. 30.26€, 25.29€, 18.05€; all well under 20kg of kefir) because it has a MediaTek MT8173 (which Lenovo calls "8713C"), which is arm64 (image 5), as a "real" — frankly, only realistic — platform to test snappy-tools hardware-accelerated CRC32C for ARM.
Now that I re-analyse the image, it clearly says "Instrukcje: crc32", which is great because I thought I was taking a gamble on an optional-in-ARMv8-A feature.
According to a page under the authority of "sites.google.com/a/chromium.org" (what does this mean?) page titled This Chromium OS > Developer Information for Chrome OS Devices[orig. arch.] (what the fuck does that mean?) this machine is:
- Release
- 27 February 2019
- OEM
- Lenovo
- Code name
- Sycamore360
- Board name(s)
- hana
- Base board
- oak
- User ABI
- arm
- Kernel
- 3.18
- Kernel ABI
- aarch64
- Platform
- MT8173
- Form Factor
- Chromebook
- First Release
- R72
which appears to also be exactly identical to a "100e" but "Sycamore".
Presumably the only difference is that this one goes sickotablet mode and has a touch-screen.
Well, mine goes but doesn't.
Note also that it disagrees with Lenovo about the C. And that the product page's URL has an mtk in it, but the title itself doesn't, and neither does the label on the bottom:
This is largely precipitated by the chrultrabook talk, but naturally, this being ARM, it's yet impossible to install Debian. This is more InstallingDebianOn/Samsung/ARMChromebook — "running debian on the chromebook from the μSD card" — than an installation. This is why I dastardlily omitted "installing" from the title, neither article for my first prospective pick giving me the same courtesy.
Also, neither appear to actually demonstrate any of the interesting platform-specific layout, and instead opt for baffling and unprecedented-in-the-text shell programs using software suites and methodologies that definitely make sense to the authors to get to the precise point they're trying to get to in the minimum article space, but.
Also, for some reason, every, as in every, Chromebook on the market has both a scandinavian keyboard and an asset tag (mine is bar-coded 005441279). Sometimes the latter also means the swedish coat of arms printed on the lid (indeed, my specimen booted at "8:00 SE"). Where are these coming from? Do swedish libraries cycle through these yearly (the claimed 2019-06-02 manufactury makes it rather recent) and dump them for less-than-free? Are literal wagon-loads of these being imported into Poland of all places?
# peep da nose cam
(This is after a thorough washing with water due to normal sugar stickiness, isopropanol because of tacky resin stains somehow, and it's still kinda goopy on the sides because despite being only 4.5 years old the rubbery edging is starting to approach rotting somehow?)
# Save me from chromium (chrome os (chromium os(?)))
because naturally the only control available on the above "Welcome" screen it boots to in OOBE is "Connect to network", which opens what amounts to the Android "Connect to Wi-Fi" screen, except you can't skip it (unlike the Android OOBE), and the subtitle is "To restore your data, connect to the internet".
Restore from where? what data? mf on the pack fr fr?
Of course, the guide[orig. arch.]s say "enter recovery and then developer mode". So to enter recovery you hold esc and ⟳ (natch) and click the power button and
That's not Sycamore360 now, is it? What does that mean. Also, what's that card? It sure as hell ain't SD. It looks like an MMC-but-I-forgor-💀-how-many-pins-it-has, but.
Note also how it's white and hasn't respected my colour inversion setting, which it itself groups as accessibility. After you get over getting flash-banged, press ctrl and d:
No prompt, why would there be. Just like there's no prompt for (or, really, nothing to even remotely imply! those are ·s, not arrows!) ˃ and ˂ (the arrow keys, which aren't labelled with arrows now) change the language.
Confirm with ↵ and it reboots and
and it's not booting. Why? Doesn't say. The only control appears to be re-enabling, but no! You can press ctrl and d again to boot. Why?
Also the punctuation is inconsistent with every other string here. Why?
After booting manually 🙄 I got
which after 30s falls through to
which is a hard five-fucking-minute secondised countdown.
Which I guarantee is a mkfs call that completed in 2s at most.
Why?
And after another reboot, and another manually-confirmed boot 🙄 there's magically a new control in the OOBE!
And this is somehow times new roman. Everything else is in Roboto and this is deadass font-family: initial;.
Also the URLs are not clickable? I didn't try selecting them, but I wouldn't put them being uncopiable past this.
You can tell no-one has ever read this
but you can also tell that in the most accessible system in the world you can't confirm entry and operate the huge fuckoff brightly-high-lit button by pressing ↵, you need to unironically go to it with the cursor and click it. Truly insane shit.
But the screen you get after is even better somehow, because it's a complete de novo re-imagining of the branding:
"Chrome device"‽ Somehow mixing both "ChromeOS" and "ChromiumOS" in consecutive paragraphs in the same pop-up is bad enough, "ChromeOS Device" as a derivative of those is reasonable, somehow turning it into "Chrome OS" or "Chromium OS" is baffling, and the "Chromebook" branding is too cutesy as it is, but "Chrome device" is unprecedented, as in "never figures in user-facing branding"-level internal nomenclature AFAICT. Except in this subtitle.
# Take me to hfbitland
Now one can switch to VT2 with the usual combination of ctrl, alt, and → (not the arrow key), and get an a-little-fucked-up /etc/issue and a getty prompt where the root creds set above work.
The guides recommend ctrl+alt+t to start the "decroded shell", but this hasn't worked for me. The chrultrabook manual agrees with me on this, however.
A nicety: pressing alt+shift+˄ or ˅ (the arrow keys) scrolls up and down. But by one line only.
But the fucking keymap is wrong. Admittedly it's ergonomic to me personally to be able to mostly use the scandi keyboard, but the keymap doesn't match what the keyboard is, like, at all. Also not having Home/End is agony.
Maybe the recovery says "PHASER360" instead of "Sycamore360" because
- Release
- 27 February 2019
- 1 March 2019
- OEM
- Lenovo
- Lenovo
- Code name
- Sycamore360
- Phaser360
- Board name(s)
- hana
- Octopus
- Base board
- oak
- octopus
- User ABI
- arm
- x86_64
- Kernel
- 3.18
- 4.14
- Kernel ABI
- aarch64
- x86_64
- Platform
- MT8173
- Gemini Lake
- Form Factor
- Chromebook
- Convertible
- First Release
- R72
- R72
which is, yes, a second identical laptop, released days apart, differing only by "(MTK)" at the end of the branding which isn't actually branded onto the product, but one has a Celeron N4000 and the other an MT8173. (Also the form factor for the ARM variant being "Chromebook"?)
# fuckin kms i s'pose
Nit-pick? Correction? Improvement? Annoying? Cute? Anything?
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