[GTALUG] refurb Acer C720 Chromebook cheap

Alex Volkov avolkov at gmail.com
Thu Dec 4 16:04:41 UTC 2014


I got one of these on sale, but even now the price is $170 which is not a
bad deal at all.

The notebook, is very thin, light and surprisingly not bad, the keyboard is
not as good as on thinkpads, but could be much, much worse. Beware that
here are no PgUp, PgDown, Home, Ins, Del keys so after some remapping ALT +
Cursor keys work.
Also on top row F-keys labelled weirdly as in chromium-specific function
keys but are in fact F1-F10. POWER button is where F11 was supposed to be.
POWER key works most of the time, hard reset button is F3+POWER.
There is left `Super` key, which is something in between of Fn and 'Windows
logo' key, but it's located where 'Caps Lock' is on regular keyboard.

When I got the chromebook it was configured for an organization 'enrollment
program', it took some googling to figure out how to set that back to
regular settings. After logging in with my gmail credentials and finding
ChromeOS to be sleek but somewhat useless, I claimed my free 1TB of Google
drive storage (* Free for 2 years) and decided to install Debian, giving it
full computing resources and not messing around with crouton.

Removing ChromeOS involves undoing 7 screws on the bottom and removing BIOS
write-protect screw, then pressing Ctrl+D during boot turns chromebook into
regular laptop with SeaBios.
Wifi card is atheros-something, but it's not the best card and seems to be
a little finicky on some wireless networks, the biggest annoyance -- you
need to add a script that unloads the drivers before laptop falls asleep,
otherwise screen will lockup on wakeup. I haven't tried using bluetooth yet.
After getting rid of everything chrome-related the hardware seems to be
pretty open, this laptop might even be a new candidate computer for RMS.

I ended up with vanilla Debian Jessie and KDE (kde-plasma-netbook, which is
really stock KDE but with some netbook-specific UI tweaks).
I had to install Wheezy first as 3.16 kernel in Jessie would not boot, and
then I had to install 3.17 as it's the first linux version that supports
touchpad. Touchpad hardware is pretty awkward, but it does support
multitouch and has a middle mouse button when you press on the middle of it
with three fingers.

I needed to do lots of tweaking to get everything working, but in the end
it is a pretty sweet laptop.
If I were installing the OS from scratch again, I would have gone with
Chrubuntu.

Battery life is pretty good -- I ran about 3+ hours without
laptop-mode-tools/cpufreq-utils and 6+ hours with. At that point I still
had about 3 hours battery left, I just didn't need to run the laptop any
more.
With 20% screen brightness, powertop shows ~4W on idle, ~11W playing 720p
video off youtube (with wireless card using about ~6W).

There's 2GB of Ram soldered onto the board and not upgradable, storage
however is, it's an 16GB M.2 card. The laptop has an SD slot, but SD card
sticks about half way out so it's impractical to go with one as a permanent
storage. I'm going to upgrade to a 128GB one but M.2 is a relatively new
standard, in the US it is $12 cheaper even after currency conversion.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EZ2E8NO
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00IZNYDBG

If anyone interested in getting a laptop, and then installing Debian, here
are few links I found useful.

http://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/04/20/c720-debian/
https://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/09/19/c720-coreboot/
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/acer-c720-chromebook
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromebook
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_C720_Chromebook
http://sweetohm.net/html/debian-jessie-acer-c720p.en.html
http://www.circuidipity.com/c720-lubuntubook-install.html
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/xorg-conf/+/master/50-touchpad-cmt-peppy.conf

Also here's my xbindkeysrc, which I compile from a few links above, I'm
using ALT as a modifier key:
.xbindkeysrc

#Backlight Down
"xbacklight -dec 5"
  m:0x8 + c:72
  Alt + F6

#Backlight Up
"xbacklight -inc 5"
  m:0x8 + c:73
  Alt + F7

#Mute
"amixer set Master toggle"
  m:0x8 + c:74
  Alt + F8

#Decrease Volume
"amixer set Master 2%- unmute"
  m:0x8 + c:75
  Alt + F9

#Increase Volume
"amixer set Master 2%+ unmute"
  m:0x8 + c:76
  Alt + F10

# added Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Down, and Del keys using the Alt+arrow key
combos
#Delete
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Delete]'"
  m:0x8 + c:22
  Alt + BackSpace

#End
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[End]'"
  m:0x8 + c:114
  Alt + Right

#Home
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Home]'"
  m:0x8 + c:113
  Alt + Left

#Page Down
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Page_Down]'"
  m:0x8 + c:116
  Alt + Down

#Page Up
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\[Page_Up]'"
  m:0x8 + c:111
  Alt + Up

#



On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 2:23 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:

> This can run linux with a bit of work.  Pretty good netbook.  As described
> by several folks on this list.  (Not yet me -- haven't got the conversion
> working yet.)
>
> $144.99 plus $4.99 shipping plus taxes.
>
> <
> http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314635&cm_re=c720-_-34-314-635-_-Product
> >
>
> Other tricks:
>
> You can join the newegg "premier" program for a 30-day free trial and get
> free shipping ($60 per year afterwords).
>
> If you pay with VISA, you can get $25 off your first purchase of $150 or
> more.  Read about that here
> <
> http://forums.redflagdeals.com/newegg-25-off-purchases-over-150-using-visa-1605939/
> >
> Expires December 5.
>
> You would have to add something to your order to qualify for this since
> the c720 is less than $150.
>
> Sadly, newegg shipping is not reduced when you combine items within an
> order.
>
>
> ---
> GTALUG Talk Mailing List - talk at gtalug.org
> http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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