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Breathing life into some disposed of ChromeBooks (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 months ago by invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

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So I'm helping a local tech non-profit refurbish some old Chromebooks for distribution to halfway houses and immigrants that need computer access for legal stuff. The current need is basically a rock solid platform for getting to websites, reading email, and editing mostly shared Google docs.

Issue is that the hardware is no longer supported by Google.

We've gone ahead and got Coreboot flashed on all 40 devices and have settled on using Fedora-Onyx (Atomic distro with a Budgie UI).

We need to install some flatpaks on each machine and set up a base configuration. Easy enough with rpm-ostree and some manual configuration, but I was wondering if anyone here has had more experience with managing the atomic distros.

Basically I want to have it so the volunteers just need to plug in a USB installer stick and get a fully setup instance. Is there an easy way to take a tree and transfer it to another machine that isn't using something like clonezilla? I'm assuming we could just maintain an image and rebase to thatafter installing, but I'm not fully aware of the easiest way to accomplish that.

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[–] FumpyAer@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You could use clonezilla (GUI) or dd (terminal) to create a disk image of an installed system with customizations and then flash it to the laptops. But I don't know if that will necessarily take fewer steps or require less technical know-how than simply booting from the live USB and installing normally.

Maybe it would be worth it if you are installing tons of stuff on each laptop.

[–] FumpyAer@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

That Kickstart thing hellinkilla posted seems like the most sensible option. If you read that page, it says that there is a kickstart config file that is auto generated during the install process. And then afterwards, you can add a list of packages to install inside that file.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

Already messed with kickstart, it's super useful to automate anything you can setup in the installer. Packages are a bit more difficult since you can only install from their base package list as far as I can tell. Plus using atomic means I need to use a flatpak which is installed in userland after install.

Thanks everyone for all the ideas, mkosi seems like a really need utility that I'll probably end up using.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

Probably gonna end up just trying to simplify the installation process, and maybe just have an install script that removes the Firefox layers, then installs the required stuff from flathub. Can also overwrite the default configs for browsers and such with a setup script that pulls them from a repo.