Category: operating systems

Rescuing Chromebooks from Google with Void Linux

Posted on by chrisa

Just some more notes from my experiments with Void Linux, particularly on a converted Chromebook.

I have to first shout out as always the incredible work done by MrChromebox, as installing custom firmware onto your Chromebook to install Linux is the ultimate improvement you can make to your severely restricted device. In order do install it, you will have to disable the write protect on your device.

On modern Chromebooks, this is usually as easy as opening the device and disconnecting the battery, then connecting wall power and running the script in Developer Mode. As always, check compatibility with your device before trying to install the firmware.

Installing Void Linux is about as easy on a ‘liberated’ Chromebook as …

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Snippets: Netbird runit script setup for Void Linux

Posted on by chrisa

Just going to throw some stuff online for my own recollection, since I keep needing to create these files:
Void Linux Netbird init script for runit on Void Linux:

Basic setup and init script:

mkdir -p /etc/sv/netbird
cat <<END >/etc/sv/netbird/run
#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
[ -r conf ] && . ./conf
exec /usr/bin/netbird service run –config /etc/netbird/config.json –log-level info –daemon-addr unix:///var/run/netbird.sock –log-file /var/log/netbird/client.log
END

And of course for post-install:

chmod +x /etc/sv/netbird/run
ln -sf /etc/sv/netbird /var/service/netbird

I’ve not yet better integrated this into logging, but will edit this post if I do so.…

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Trying out the Qubes 4.1 beta on newer Intel and Ryzen devices, and the FrameWork Laptop

Posted on by chrisa

A quick post since I have seen various folks ask online whether their laptop is supported by Qubes OS. I decided to grab the beta of the 4.1 release from July and try it out on some laptops (and my current desktop) where a new release would be most helpful, especially on some Ryzen-based systems where the previous 4.0 release did not work well out of the box. Since I also recently got the wonderfully consumer-friendly FrameWork laptop, I would try it out there as well, since I plan to use it as my daily driver OS.

You can see from the table below that there is some decent support for even relatively recently Ryzen CPUs. In fact at …

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Qubes OS is incredible, here’s some tips and quick hacks for it

Posted on by chrisa

I can’t stop thinking about Qubes OS. I really feel like it’s the most interesting innovation in OS distributions in 20 years. In fact that’s what I tell everyone who will listen when I talk about it.

Explaining Computers did a very nice intro to the operating system, which is where I heard about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWDvS_Mp6gc.

I just wanted to compile some tips and tricks I have encountered so far with Qubes:

Hardware Support (Ryzen 3000 series)

[Update: I tried out the Qubes 4.1 beta on several recent devices. If you want to potentially skip a lot of the headache mentioned below and are using newer hardware, check out that article first!]

Qubes OS is very finicky about …

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