Coming this week

Coming this week to my blog:

• how to setup and use android without a gmail account
• alternatives to facebook

Installing Ubuntu on Acer R11 chromebook

Difficulty: Expert

From a suggestion I recieved I have set this difficulty level to expert so that you will know that out of all the tutorials I am going to do I consider this to be a fairly high difficulty rating. Full disclaimer it’s possible following this tutorial that you will brick your chromebook. In any case you are at a minimum committed that you won’t be running chromeos anymore. Sure you could technically get it all back but the process is not nice. So without further ado the tutorial.

I have been degoogling my life. So one thing I had to figure out was how to get chromeos off of my chromebook. This can sound really daunting but I found the process to be a lot easier than I thought. I am going to save you all a ton of time and explain the whole process. I did this for the acer R11 chromebook the process should be very similar for any intel type chromebook.

Enable Developer Mode:

This is a fairly simple process. essentially this will give you root access to your machine so you can do all the other interesting stuff.

hold down ESC + Refresh + power button

This will reboot the machine and when you get to the scary white screen do a CTRL + D to enable developer mode.

 

Disable firmware write protection:

This is the kind of freaky part you will need to open up the computer. Unscrew all the case screws on the underside of the laptop. Use a pry tool with the laptop upside down to separate the bottom of the case from the keyboard section. Open the laptop up like a book to expose the inside.

the right protection screw is next to the wireless card and has a big goofy arrow pointing to it.

be careful removing this because it will be snug and has a bit of solder securing it. I found a 1.5 flat head to work better than a Philips for me.

 

Flash coreboot firmware:

boot the computer up. and now comes the firmware flashing. we need to replace the bios with something that will work for a normal PC set up. Thankfully we stand on the shoulders of other smart techs who have figured this out.

go to the following link:

https://mrchromebox.tech/#fwscript

you will need all these instructions so maybe open them up on another device.

1) open a terminal by typing ctrl+alt+t

2) in the terminal type shell

3) put in the following command

cd; curl -LO https://mrchromebox.tech/firmware-util.sh && sudo bash firmware-util.sh

in the resulting utility you will want to type 3 and then press enter.

go through the prompts and for further information on what this does refer to the link from before.

Once you are done with all this you can now reboot and you should see that core boot is installed.

Install Ubuntu:

At this point just install Ubuntu or any other distro or even windows if you are so inclined. You now have a standard PC laptop. But think you have an ubuntu laptop with a touch screen at a crazy price point!

For those wondering yes the touchscreen does work. Autorotation of the screen appears to not work but I am still playing with that. In tablet mode the keyboard stays enabled but the touchpad disables so I assume I can tweak that to correct it. I will post an update at some point if I figure those out.

Audio issue.

for some reason I didn’t test the audio. Not sure why but I am finding that the audio does not work. I have been doing some tinkering and I think I might have a fix. Of course it comes after trying a bunch of stuff so I think my configs are all messed up. I am going to do some more playing with it and if I have good solution I will update this page with it.

How to fix the Audio issue:

this took a ton of research but seems to be working fine:

https://erdnaxe.github.io/chromebook-linux/#audio-alsa-use-case-manager-definitions

 

Degoogling

I hear it all the time “Google is so evil all they do is spy”. This lament is normally followed up with “well I guess there is nothing you can do about it so you might as well not worry about it”. This last statement is not true at all you can in fact do a lot about it. Now just a disclaimer there are certain things you will not be able to control because they have nothing to do with user behavior. For instance the fact that Google works with credit card companies to track what you buy. That might not be something you can do a whole lot about at least without putting in a herculean effort. However you do have a lot of control over your technology choices.

Over the next several weeks I am going to put out a series of posts about how to realistically degoogle your life. You can do some of it or all of it but I think you will see it’s very possible to do everything you already do without using google to do it. Remember each one of these things you do will be that much less data that is being collected. Below I have detailed some of the things that I will cover

• How to replace chromeos with a PC operating system on a chromebook
• picking a privacy concious email provider
• finding an alternative google search
• Phones that respect your privacy

Stay tuned and subscribe if you haven’t already.

Leaving Facebook 2.0

I was going to write a post about reading facebook and then low and behold I realized I already had a post about that from the last failed attempt to leave facebook. I still agree with all those reasons so you can go read that post if you want to know some additional reasons to this current move.

1. I don’t spend very much time on facebook. Most of what I see on facebook is just memes.
2. I tend to be a privacy concious person. Although I recognize that there is only a certain level of privacy achievable online I feel it’s my duty to retain as much as possible.
3. Facebook is an international bad actor. Governments have been trying to get them to have better practices but in most cases they have ignored these government requests.  It’s been mostly out of arrogance on the part of facebook that they know better. It’s not really a platform I want to support by having an account.

how you can keep in touch with me…. Well I am probably going to maintain this blog a lot better. I prefer to put things out in long form and I wanted to detail some of the stuff I have been working on in the privacy front so I will use this page for that.

Some things I am working on:

1. a free software replacement for Loseit: I like the loseit platform for weight loss but I would really like to be able to control my data and biometrics. It’s a project I started tinkering with several years ago but I am planning on taking it to the next level. I am trying to decide if I want it to be a cloudbased platform or a locally running app.
2. switching to protonmail for email purposes
3. switching to the Librem 5 phone for telephony

Stay tuned to this blog for deatils.