💾 Archived View for need.substantialplumbing.repair › posts › 2023-10-27.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:34:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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The Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook sports new-ish hardware, which is great for Lenovo fans who want to try something other than 10-year-old+ hardware from Ebay or wherever.
I thought it would be interesting to remove ChromeOS and run Ubuntu bare metal on this device. Some of you may disagree with my distro choice, so I am open to suggestions.
Sooooo you are going to need to replace the firmware on the Chromebook with this stuff from some random dude online. Instead of having your UEFI firmware come from some random company that you are ultimately unfamiliar with (email me if you are familiar with one of them!), your firmware will come from some random dude online with a spiffy .tech domain.
Do I trust this? No. Did I trust the other firmware? No. Do I have any reason to trust or distrust any of them? To be truthful, I have no clue how to evaluate any of this stuff. I could at least theoretically read the github repos from MrChromebox, but we all know I am not going to do that, as I am too busy these days doing not that. Should you trust any of this? Should you trust anything? Anyway, here's a link:
I installed Ubuntu on the thing. I have Ubuntu everywhere. You should be able to figure out how to do this very easily, unless you talk about using Arch a lot.
In keeping with the philosophy of not trusting scripts from strangers on the internet, I found a very helpful github with python I've yet to look at to do stuff on the computer that eventually results in audio working.
You might notice some kernel oops and log entries such as
adding CRTC not allowed without modesets: requested 0x2, affected 0x3
or
WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 3506 at drivers/gpu/drm/drm_atomic.c:1406 drm_atomic_check_only+0x3c5/0x400 [drm]
You might be experiencing problems with USB-C and the i915 driver. This seems like a known issue with a simple known workaround:
This keyboard makes some compromises regarding key availability and functionality. I've trained myself into some quite objectionable set of key combinations and mappings, in order to preserve the top row fuctionality (it's pretty neat!) while still allowing me to do simple things like Page Down or controversial things like function keys. Alt Gr can be a friend here, as well as Input Remapper
This has been a pretty reasonable little portable with very long battery life, reasonably powerful CPU for a very low price. Batteries for these contraptions are bound to be newer than your traditional Thinkpad 220 spares available wherever they still appear.
Lenovo gave me no money to write this. Lenovo has taken my money a bunch of times, doesn't know my name, does not even send me a birthday card and then I wrote this.
Experiences with a Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook was published on 2023-10-27