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Comment by spansoa | Hacker News Reader

> A chrultrabook is a modified Chromebook designed to run Windows, Linux, or even macOS by utilizing MrChromebox coreboot firmware

Why should I trust 'MrChromebox' firmware? I trust Google more than some rando side project on GitHub.

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You don't have to but I used MrChromebox's firmware on a C710, C720, and 2 Asus Chromeboxes.

The project has been around about 10 years. I think it if was not trustworthy we probably would have heard something by now.

I remember using the SeaBIOS firmware from them around 2014. Since then I've updated all machines to the UEFI firmware and now they can even boot Windows. I run the latest Fedora distribution on all of them and they work fine.

Well it's coreboot, you can compile it yourself if that's something you're worried about.

You're free to read the code and compile it yourself, I don't understand this question.

To trust the code you need to understand it, or trust someone else that understand it. I would not claim I can do that without spending a lot of time since I'm unfamiliar with the coreboot code base in the first place. Saying "you can just recompile yourself" is as useful as "you can cook deadly mushrooms yourself" instead of getting food poisoning from a 3rd party.

You say that like you or anyone else on the planet understands and trusts all the software they have running on their (phone/laptop/desktop).

That ship sailed a long time ago.

I think the idea is that all the people on the planet collectively can understand whether to trust all the software. The rest is comms.

Transparency breeds legitimacy.

Look, being able to look at the source of truth is the best you can hope for. Moreover, the project has been around for some time. If that's not enough, then fair, at the end of the day the choice is yours.

How would a person go from the sources posted on github to the binaries that get flashed? I don't see anything in https://github.com/MrChromebox that seems to be actual build scripts, without which the numerous other repos are less than useful

Switch on developer mode on a supported device, pop a shell, and run 'cd; curl mrchromebox.tech/firmware-util.sh --output firmware-util.sh; sudo bash firmware-util.sh'

For more detail, I point you toward the fine documentation

That's how you flash the precompiled binaries. I want to know how you make those binaries.

* ensure you have coreboot prereqs installed per doc.coreboot.org

* git clone https://github.com/MrChromebox/coreboot.git

* cd coreboot

* git submodule update --init --checkout --recursive

* make crossgcc-i386

* ./build-uefi.sh <name of board to build>

I don't think the project is aimed at you personally as an individual. It seems to be aimed at whoever think it's neat.

I donated monthly to MrChromebox for more than a bit.

Before COVID hit, I used his firmware and ~20 1st Gen Asus/HP Chromeboxen (upgraded RAM to 16G and 128/256GB SSD replacements, i7-4600U Haswell, cases stripped off and heatsinks added to the new SSDs) to create a physical K8s lab.

I no longer need to run that kind of lab, but I still use those a few of those nodes for running services at home. Proxmox/Docker/K8s/Win Server/etc, a bit more power draw, but x86-64 and since they "expire", you'll see a periodic flood of devices to places like eBay.

nearly a decade of continuous contributions to upstream coreboot, and featured on their own documentation: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html#mrchromebox

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