HCL: HP Chromebook 14 (4GB)

[Andrew B]

Hi,

I've attached the HCL report for my Chromebook. I redacted the SSD firmware revision number, but the rest is untouched. For some reason the BIOS string was left empty, but it's coreboot & SeaBIOS.

A few general notes about using this Chromebook with Qubes:
1) VT-d is not supported.
2) The touchpad does not work out of the box (though supposedly there are some kernel patches which will fix this--I haven't tried).
3) Despite the capability for 'secure boot', you must boot in the usual, untrusted way via the legacy BIOS (press Ctrl+L at startup). It also requires first enabling USB boot, dev mode, and legacy mode before even trying to install Qubes.
4) This Chromebook (maybe all?) has a lovely habit of clearing some hardware state after sufficiently long loss of power. This means that your system will be inaccessible (!) if you pick it up after a while. Your data is still safe, but you have to use a hacked USB 'recovery image' that does NOT delete the user partition but only restores the [N]VRAM settings. Ugly.

3 & 4 can probably be fixed by customizing coreboot; see e.g. https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download/ or the OSCON 2013 presentation on coreboot. 4 can (probably) be fixed just with the instructions here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromebook#Boot_to_SeaBIOS_by_default but I have not tried them.

5) Despite the slow CPU, it's quite usable for everyday tasks. Youtube videos play fine.
6) 16GB is not enough, so either find a 32GB model or get your own SSD.

It's far from "plug and play", but it works...
Andrew

[Andrew B]

The touchpad works with the 3.17 kernel in qubes-dom0-unstable.
Also, I forgot to mention that it appears all external USB ports (and maybe the webcam?) are on the same controller.

Andrew