Librean

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 TODO: basic graphical desktop like xfce

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.

Dependencies

Librean has been tested on Debian 9 Stretch (in a vm) 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

Build

Currently split between 'buildKernel.sh' and 'buildDebianFs.sh' Run the kernel one then the fs one.

Install

Write the 2GB image to a flash drive, which contains the full 15GB (acutally 14.7GB) to write to the internal storage. We can do this since the 15GB image is a sparse file.

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

Now on the C201, login as root. The password is blank. Write the 15GB image to the internal storage For me this was /dev/mmcblk2 but it may be /dev/mmcblk1 for you depending on what device it assigns to sdcards

dd if=/debian-stretch-c201-libre-2GB.img of=/dev/$DEVICE bs=50M

Reboot. Run /Install.sh which will install xfce, wicd, and some device configurations. This will reboot one last time when done.

/Install.sh

You should now be greeted by the xfce login screen.

If you just want a basic enviroment without xfce upu can skip running Install.sh but I recommend installing wicd-curses for wifi configuration.

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 Librean 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

Librean 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.