Libreboot Now Supports The Chromebook C201

Written by Michael Larabel in Coreboot on 12 October 2015 at 10:44 AM EDT. 8 Comments
COREBOOT
There hasn't been much modern hardware supported by Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that eliminates all binary blobs to be fully free software, but now the ASUS Chromebook C201 is supported by Libreboot.

Authored by Paul Kocialkowski and committed by Francis Rowe, the Chromebook C201 is the newest device working on Libreboot. The C201 is what Google had codenamed "Veyron Speedy" and is the ASUS device with a Rockchip 1.8GHz SoC, 2GB of DDR3 RAM (there's also a 4GB model), 16GB SSD storage, and an 11.6-inch 1366x768 display.

The C201 is still for sale and can be found for just over $160 USD at Amazon.com while can be re-flashed from Google's Coreboot image to using the fully-open Libreboot.

As explained by the Libreboot commit enabling the C201, "this produces a standalone Libreboot image that can be flashed to the RO Coreboot partition of the SPI flash, as well as the Libreboot version that can be flash to the RO Firmware ID partition. Libreboot on the Chromebook C201 uses the depthcharge bootloader, modified to display text messages instead of ChromeOS bitmaps (that encourage the use of ChromeOS)."
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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