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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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[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that totally makes sense. I've had a hell of a time trying to get encryption working properly and smoothly. In theory it should be OK but once you introduce any kind of complexity there are problems. One complexity being using really shitty hardware, which I'm well acquainted with. And it probably isn't a good idea to implement something that has a lot of new-to-you techniques because you do not want to realize there is a problem that needs to be fixed on every machine after a month.

BTW you should count on the devices failing in mysterious and unrepairable ways. Eventually they all fail and you can't do much about it. Sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly stop out of nowhere.

I was thinking about the shared password issue and I think it still protects against stuff being found if stolen or lost. I don't think you'd want individual decryption passwords. Impossible to manage.

I wonder if your users will want to use thumb drives or other external storage. On the one hand it would be good to encourage using gnome disks or something to encrypt them, but that is terribly incompatible outside linux. So if you make it difficult to store stuff, people will end up putting all their stuff on a FAT32 doohicky that floats around in their purse or pocket, where it could find its way virtually anywhere. So I think moderation is very sensible to avoid incentivizing workarounds that are way worse.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Totally agree with you there. The atomic stuff is new to me as well, but after seeing the weird compatibility and stability issues that these things had with a regular install, I figured it was worth the plunge to have the A/B update system. Also means installing a bunch of stuff is harder for the end user unless they know the 3 commands you need to bypass the ostree lol.

I wish people would just natural have a better time understanding technology, but reality is that 90% of the people we distribute computers to barely know how to use a keyboard and many don't speak English. These machines are single purpose devices, and any additional security we add will just make them toss it in the trash.

We do have education sessions where we teach people how to use a browser, how to open Gmail, how to identify a scam, etc. I've been wanting to expand those classes to have some basic Intro to Linux, intro to Python, intro to Bash, etc. type classes that teach people the bare minimum so they can start learning. But that's only gonna work with the kids. Any older person that gets one of these devices needs to have it work as frictionless as possible with a minimal amount of interaction.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

I wonder of it would be worthwhile to have a few machines designated by interface language to support non English users. The localization takes up massive space if you get all of it. But maybe like a few Spanish-enabled machines or whatever is most relevant.

I like to share my computer hobby with people too but its a tough sell. it requires a massive investment of time and attention to get comfortable with the basics. Out of reach for most adults. I feel like its a victory if I just get people to look at what's on the screen, like peruse the menus and see what the system is offering to you. Most just click the icon they know they need ignore the rest. I think anything that encourages simple exploration of the available tools is empowering. Once you see what the computer can already do, then you start to think about what it could do.