Tegra time
So I have my ex-wife’s HP Chromebook Model 14-x030nr and apparently it’s one of the two models of Chrome that run on an architecture from Nvidia. I believe its called Tegra K1 CPU Kepler microarchitecture. I just haven’t found anywhere to get into the boot process and install a system running properly on here. Nobody seems to be producing an answer so I recently started subscribing to your magazine and some time spent cherry picking your issues so…I figured I would ask you all as my final stop. A final yes it can be done with x,y,z or nope sorry Nvidia was kind enough to lock it up like the crown jewels would be appreciated, because at least that would give me a reliable source from which I could decide to carry on or just hand it back to her for parts. The keyboard letters aren’t functioning correctly and I’ve triggered developer mode to do a clean install plus taken the case off to make sure everything looked good internally… so help please great wizards of linOZ
Chromed-Out-DGomez
Neil says: Ah, Nvidia. I think the heart of the problem lies, there. Many ARM-based processors have large parts of themselves locked away in binary, proprietary blobs and often this includes the bootloader. Even the Raspberry Pi Broadcom still isn’t open in this regard which caused headaches trying to get it to work with network booting. Whereas with x86 processors – built by Intel or AMD – the bootloader process is a known open standard. Then of course you’ll need to have the correct ARM-32/64 build of a suitable Linux distro, which would typically be Ubuntu or a lowresource spin.
Now I had a quick hunt around and it seems it is possible even with hardware acceleration, but it’s certainly not straightforward. You can find more at this thread on the Ask Ubuntu forums, http://askubuntu.com/ questions/835755/installubuntu-arm-lts-on-a-hpchromebook-14-g3-tegra-k1nyan-blaze I think the Reddit discussion they’re referring to is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ chrubuntu/comments/4w3f0x/ guide_install_chrubuntu_on_ tegra_k1_chromebook/?st=iw3 rh0l5&sh=9b201dc7 If in doubt you can fall back to using Crouton, though this rarely has acceleration when it comes to ARM-based devices.