Someone gave me a Hisense C11 Chromebook and I’m wondering if there’s absolutely anything I can do with it. It seems like a piece of junk and the Linux stuff I’ve seen for Chromebooks specify that they don’t work with the ARM processor. Is there any distro that would work on it? Any other ideas about how to repurpose it?
Note: I don’t have direct access to an Ethernet cable/router for setup. Also don’t have the most technical knowhow.
I know ArchLinuxArm (a fork of the ArchLinux project) supports the Hisense C11. It does seem to be a fairly involved procesd, and (potentially?) requires using external media rather than the onboard eMMC storage to boot a Linux system.
Your particular Chromebook contains the same SoC (Rockchip RK3288) as an Asus C201, which Debian has an install guide for. Once again, a fairly involved process and this one may not be guaranteed to work if the C11 has some quirks not present in the C201.
I think the real question is, what do you want to repurpose it for?
Because the answer to your question is yes, it is usable, but whether or not it’s capable of what you want to use it for, we can’t say without more information.
Linux installation appears to be possible. This is a wiki to an Arch on ARM distro, but you might want to look for something a bit more user friendly if you’re not comfortable with Arch.
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/rockchip/hisense-chromebook-c11#installation
Just remember, it’s a fairly low spec machine. Think of it like a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and monitor built in, in terms of what you can hope to run on it.
The biggest roadblock will be whether the bootloader will allow another OS. You should be able to search xda forums for your device as a start.
Linux can be installed on ARM, no problem.
Looks like it is supported in Postmarket os. I just installed that on a Lenovo Duet arm based Chromebook.
There’s nothing you can do with that one I think, for two reasons:
- MrChromeBox’s firmware doesn’t support this model. That’s the guy’s site that tells you how to unlock the bootloader and install the new firmware on it, that allows you to then install another OS.
- It only has 2 GB of RAM. For a better online experience with any modern Linux, you need a minimum of 4 GB. You could install though something like Kodi, or librelec, or some game emulation distro instead of a desktop OS. But without #1, you can’t do that either. That’s a landfill laptop AFAIC.
Man, imagine how hard people worked to make sure that perfectly good hardware would turn into a useless paperweight one day.
It’s fucking crazy how much work goes into shitting out thousands and thousands of slightly different models of android phone and tablet and chromebook. Slap together a board design based on buying two trays of some SOC. Open up the Android source, slap some NDA drivers in, build an image, burn it into a production run. Don’t bother saving your changes, these devices will never get an update. Two weeks later, change out the whole design for a different chip, repeat.
