PrawnOS

A build system for making blobless debian and mainline kernel for the Asus c201 Chromebook

Build a mainline kernel and Debian filesystem with: No blobs, anywhere. Support for Aetheros AR271 usb wifi dongles through the open source firmware Minimal toolset intended as a based, including tools to setup a wifi connection Sources from only main, not contrib or non-free which keeps Debian libre Currently PrawnOS supports lxqt, with plans to include xfce as an option in the future

why

Combined with libreboot, an AR271 wifi dongle, and a libre OS (like Debian, the one built by this) the asus c201 is a fully libre machine with no blobs, or microcode.

Image Download

If you don't want to or can't build the image, a download is available here https://archive.org/details/PrawnOSAlphaC201Libre2GBVERSION2

Dependencies

Building PrawnOS has been tested on Debian 9 Stretch (in a vm) This is the only build enviroment that is supported. These packages are required:

	apt install --no-install-recommends --no-install-suggests \
		parted cgpt \
		git gawk device-tree-compiler vboot-kernel-utils gcc-arm-none-eabi \
	        u-boot-tools \
		gcc make libc-dev wget g++ cmake \
		binfmt-support qemu-user-static debootstrap \
		lzip libssl-dev libncurses-dev flex bison sudo patch bc

Build

Clone this git repo.

Build the PrawnOS-...-.img by running sudo make image

This has only been tested on a Debian stretch VM, and borrows some components from the host system to setup apt/debootstrap during the build process so I would recommend using a Debian Stretch VM to avoid any issues.

Install

Write the 2GB image to a flash drive. Make sure to replace $USB_DEVICE with the desired target flash drive

sudo dd if=PrawnOs-*-c201-libre-2GB.img of=/dev/$USB_DEVICE bs=50M

Now on the C201, login as root. The password is blank. If you would like to install it to the internal emmc storage run: WARNING! THIS WILL ERASE YOUR INTERNAL EMMC STORAGE (your chrome OS install or other linux install and all of the associated user data) MAke sure to back up any data you would like to keep before running this.

cd /
./InstallToInternal.sh

The device will then reboot, and should boot to the internal storage by default. If it doesn't, turn off the device and remove the flash drive before turning it on again.

Now login as root again and run:

cd /InstallResources
./InstallPackages.sh

Which installs the lxqt desktop enviroment, wicd, sound, trackpad, and Xorg configurations as well as prompts you to make a new user that automatically gets sudo priviledges.

When finished, it will reboot once again placing you at a login screen.

If you just want a basic enviroment without xfce upu can skip running InstallPackages.sh but I recommend installing wicd-curses for wifi configuration. Since the package is doenloaded but not installed by the build process, you can do that by running:

apt install wicd-curses

Congratulations! YOur computer is now a Prawn! https://sprorgnsm.bandcamp.com/track/the-prawn-song

Make options, developer tools

(ALl of these should be ran as root or with sudo to avoid issues) The makefile automates many processes that make debuggung the kernel or the filesystem easier. TO begin with:

make kernel_config cross compiles make menuconfig Cross compiling is required for any of the linux kernel make options that edit the kernel config, as the linux kernel build system makes assumptions that change depending on what platform it is targeting.

make kernel builds just the kernel

make filesystem builds the filesystem and kernel into a PrawnOS.img

make kernel_inject Injects a newly built kernel into a previously build PrawnOS.img located in the root of the checkout

GPU Support

Watch this link for gpu support: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/panfrost and this one for progress updates: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/gpu-feed.xml

Build the wifi dongle into the laptop

Check out the instructions here: https://github.com/SolidHal/AsusC201-usb-wifi-from-webcam

Troubleshooting

The pulse audio mixer will only run if you are logged in as a non-root account. This is an issue (feature?) of pulse audio

Credits and Legal Information

Thanks to dimkr for his great devsus scripts, from which PrawnOS took much inspiration https://github.com/dimkr/devsus

Because of this started as a fork of devsus, much of this repos history can be found at https://github.com/SolidHal/devsus/tree/hybrid_debian

PrawnOS is free and unencumbered software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2; see COPYING for the license text. For a list of its authors and contributors, see AUTHORS.