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My Story of Getting Heads on a Chromebook

·479 words·3 mins
Chris Wiggins
Author
Chris Wiggins

The Device
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The Acer Chromebook Spin 714, or “KANO” as it’s often called, is the first Chromebook that supports Heads. I picked it up about a year ago on Facebook Marketplace with an Acer Chromebook Spin 713 for about $200. The previous owner had already installed MrChromebox’s Coreboot fork on it and installed Fedora.

My Involvement
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Over the last few months, I’ve been contributing some of my time to adding support for the Heads bootloader to my Acer Chromebook Spin 714. I had heard about Heads from a coworker a few months ago and was interested in the idea; however, I did not have a supported device. Sadly, my Framework 13 does not support Coreboot, which means there isn’t a direct path to Heads support.

It all started with Heads PR 1658 from mdrobnak. They did a lot of the initial work on the KANO device. Unfortunately, PR 1658 was never fully merged. When I stumbled upon the PR, I knew I should pick it up. tlaurion created PR 2057. After checking it out, I decided to take it up and get it working.

The entire effort took a few months, and there was a lot of back and forth (you can see all the comments on the GitHub PR!). I’ve been running Heads on my KANO device for a few months now, and it’s been working great.

What’s Next
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I have two other ChromeOS devices that already have MrChromebox’s Coreboot fork.

  1. The HP Chromebox G2 with a Celeron CPU. This one is interesting. I mainly use it as a fully offline system to perform security-sensitive tasks such as private key generation. I usually boot into AirGapOS and use keyfork.
  2. The Acer Chromebook Spin 713. This laptop is very similar to the KANO device that I already ported Heads to. Currently, my wife uses it, and her threat model does not require Heads, so for the time being, this device will take a back seat regarding the Heads port.

A few more ChromeOS devices that I have my eye on:

  1. Google Pixel Slate. This device intrigues me because it’s a tablet with a nicer keyboard. I’ve also been interested in smaller computers and having a tablet with Linux that I can easily attach a keyboard to and get real work done would be awesome. I’ve searched on eBay and these devices actually seem to go for more than I thought, and the keyboard seems even more difficult to find.
  2. The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. This one, in my opinion, is the holy grail: fully repairable, backed by a company that I like, with support for 64 GB of memory. If I got my hands on this laptop and ported Heads, it would be awesome. Unfortunately, these seem more difficult to find than the Google Pixel Slate. I don’t think many were made, and Framework discontinued them.