Acer C720 Chromebook (was: Re: looking for new netbook)

El día Thursday, November 27, 2014 a las 10:43:42AM +0100, Matthias Apitz escribió:

> I'm looking for a new netbook laptop; my old EeePC 900 (from 2008) has
> to short battery time, and the Acer Aspire One D250 has a problem with the
> display (from time to time goes completely white, the system is running,
> but one has to reboot to get an image again);
> 
> What I want is more or less:
> 
> -- 1-2 GByte RAM
> -- 1024x600 display, ~10 inch
> -- 50++ GByte SSD disk
> -- normal QWERTY/Z keyboard (i.o. no tablet)
> -- Wifi supported in head
> -- USB ports for UMTS dongle
> -- and of course, it should run FreeBSD;
> 
> Any pointers to a modern device?

Some week ago I have asked the above question and with the free time
during the change of the year I can now answer it an I want to share
some experiences:

I found the Acer C720 Chromebook with the following technical data:

-- 2 GByte RAM (soldered on board, not update-able)
-- 2 core CPU, each 1.4 GHz
-- display 1366x768, ~11 inch, very nicely support by Xorg VESA driver
-- Wifi Atheros AR946x/AR948x, supported by ah(4)
-- sound supported by snd_hda(4)
-- 16 GByte SSD, can be swapped by, for example,  MTS400 M.2 SSD 128GB  SATA III, MLC (128 GByte)

I will attach a dmesg output;

The problem was:

1. It needs take apart the device to unlock the BIOS protection to be able to
   use a SeaBIOS for legacy boot from SSD or USB;
2. One needs some patches against -HEAD;

All this is very good documented by the author of the patches, Michael
Gmelin, in his blog:

http://blog.grem.de/pages/c720.html

Thanks to him for this work and his helping hand during my first steps with
this nice device. I think, the patches should be incorporated into SVN,
at the moment they are against -HEAD as of January 5th.

The keyboard of the C720, in principle a normal PC105, mine with German
layout QWERTZ, is a bit tricky: it has

- only F-keys from F1 to F10 and they are labeled with symbols for the
  ChromeOS applications;
- no hardware power-off (only by an ACPI key which is situated where F11
  would be, i.e. right above the Backspace key, you see the risk :-) )
- no Windows key which could be used as Modifier-key in X11;
- no PageUP/DOWN keys
- no 'blue Fn' key for additional functions (like audio or brightnes)

In his blog Michael documents as well ways to help out of this.

It now runs very nicely -HEAD (still booted from an USB stick because
I'm waiting for the 128 GByte SSD to swap it). I'm really surprised about
the battery: lasts for 6-8 hours. Wow!!!

HIH

	matthias

-- 
Matthias Apitz, guru_at_unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ +49-170-4527211
1989-2014: The Wall was torn down so that we go to war together again.
El Muro ha sido derribado para que nos unimos en ir a la guerra otra vez.
Diese Grenze wurde aufgehoben damit wir gemeinsam wieder in den Krieg ziehen.