Linux on Sysadmin Tales

Linux on an Asus CR11 Chromebook

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:52:08 -0500

In which I have zero self control

While browsing the Amazon Black Friday sales a few weeks ago, a particular deal caught my eye.

An ASUS Chromebook CR11 ruggedized laptop for around $130.

Now, I have enough laptops, but I’ve always wanted to try and hack Linux onto one, and this one was attractive due to its ruggedized nature as well as a full blown Intel N100 CPU.

I purchased the laptop and once it arrived, I began poking around the internet to see how I could get regular Linux on this thing.

Installing Linux, Part 1

I have no desire to use Google’s spyware filled ChromeOS, so if I couldn’t find a way to get Linux on this machine, it was going back to Amazon.

A few searches guided me to mrchromebox.tech.

This specific model I had was very similar to a few other builds that show full compatibility, so my hopes were raised.

I went through their Getting Started guide, which helped me get Developer Mode enabled, and I found my device ID.

ANRAGGAR

This HWID showed full compatibility with the full UEFI replacement firmware, which is exactly what I wanted.

However, on most ChromeOS devices, it’s a requirement to disable hardware write protection in order to flash the replacement firmware.

This particular model had a Ti50 security chip, so the only method of disabling write protection was to use Closed Case Debugging (CCD). This process requires a “SuzyQ” ChromeOS debug board.

A little bit annoying, but not the end of the world.

I went on eBay and found the debug board listed here..

It took around a week to get to my house, and with that in hand, I tried again.

Installing Linux, Part 2

I followed the steps listed here to disable hardware write protection.

Note

NOTE

A SuzyQ cable is not like a typical USB-C connected device, where it is reversible. If you look closely at the board, one will be labeled side A, the other is side B. On the board that I received, side A needed to be facing up.
I had plugged it into the top left USB-C port on my laptop, I’m not sure if it will work when plugged into the other one. However, I did power the board by plugging it into the other available USB-C port.
The MrChromebox documentation says that it takes 2-3 minutes of pressing the physical presence sensor to enable CCD. In reality, it was more like 5. It paused several times during the process, and it rebooted without ever showing me the “PP Done!” message that the docs suggest. However, the steps there did work fine.

Once I had gone through the steps and verified that hardware write protection was indeed disabled, I proceeded to the next step, which was flashing the firmware.

I used the provided firmware utility script to flash the firmware.

Generally I don’t recommend running scripts blindly from the internet, but it truly does make this process a ton easier, and if you wish, you can review the script yourself. (And I recommend doing so before you run it!)

First, I backed up the existing ChromeOS firmware to a USB stick. Handy, in case I ended up needing to return this laptop.

Then, I proceeded to flash the Coreboot UEFI firmware.

It took a few minutes, but once done I was able to boot into the Fedora 43 Sway Spin installer.

Some problems

I noticed right away that the touchpad didn’t work in the installer, but I proceeded anyway. I could have grabbed a mouse, but being the lazy person I am, I just navigated the installation with the keyboard instead.

Once installed, it took me a few minutes to figure out where all the needed buttons were.

Linux maps the Chromebook Search key to Super_L, which I needed to open the default drun menu. Can’t do much in Sway without being able to open drun or a similar launcher!

The touchpad still didn’t work, and neither did sound. However, everything else worked a treat.

It was a bit strange, since the touchpad appeared normally in libinput --list-devices, and the sound driver appeared normally in pavucontrol, however, neither of them worked at all, and there were a TON of errors in dmesg regarding the sound driver.

I did some searching on the chultrabook forums, and I was able to find solutions for both issues.

Fixing the audio problem

The chultrabook docs contained a “Post-Install” FAQ that was very helpful - I found their audio script which was all I needed to get sound working.

Fixing the touchpad problem

The touchpad issue was a bit trickier to pin down.

Eventually I found this post that pointed me in the right direction.

The answer was to configure a libinput quirk:

sudo vim /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks

Enter the following content:

[PNP Touchpad]
MatchName=*PNP*Touchpad*
AttrResolutionHint=31x31
AttrPressureRange=10:8

Replace PNP with your touchpad model as it shows up in libinput --list-devices.

Once you’ve done so, write and quit the file, then reboot your Chromebook.

Success! The touchpad now works!

Final Thoughts

The Chromebook performs very well under Fedora, but I’m also not running a full on desktop environment.

If KDE is your preferred environment, you may run into more issues, especially since this device only has 4GB of onboard memory, and a relatively weak Intel CPU.

I haven’t used Gnome in quite some time, but I expect it would run into similar limitations.

The screen isn’t fantastic, but it’s good enough for what I’m planning on using this laptop for - effectively just tossing it in my bag when I need a super small and light laptop for travelling, or when I want to sit on the couch and chat on Discord while watching TV.

Do I recommend buying this specifically to run Linux?

No, not really.

It works great once you get it going, especially for the price, but you can likely find better laptops on eBay.

Used ThinkPads are the way to go for cheap laptops.

This was just a fun little “I wonder if I can do this” project.

That said, if you already have one of these devices? I highly recommend installing regular Linux on it.

Setting up brscan-skey with the Brother DS-940DW on Ubuntu

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 18:58:09 -0400

Setting up brscan-skey with the Brother DS-940DW on Ubuntu

Overview

The Brother DS-940DW is a little handheld mobile scanner. Getting it working on Linux in a way where you can actually use the Start/Stop button on the scanner to scan things was a bit of a bear, so I thought I’d document how I did it.

Part of the issue is that brscan-skey depends on the old version of libsane, and does not work with libsane1.

Solving the dependency problem

First, install the provided driver from the support page for the DS-940DW You can grab the scan-key-tool deb package from here.

Going by this Brother support article, I was able to get brscan-skey installed.

Steps

sudo su
apt update
apt install sane libsane1 sane-utils imagemagick
wget -c http://jp.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/s/sane-backends/libsane_1.1.1-5_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libsane_1.1.1-5_amd64.deb
apt install evince

Configure scanning

I had all sorts of fun figuring out how this all works, and honestly it’s pretty simple.

Pressing the Start/Stop button on the scanner while brscan-skey is running calls this shell script:

/opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantofile.sh

You can have it do whatever you want by editing the script.

By default it uses psutils and pod2pdf, and a bunch of other utilities to scan first to PostScript, then convert it to PDF.

I don’t often have the need to scan complex documents, so I simplified this quite a bit, as I’ll show you here in second.

But before we do anything, we need to add some udev rules.

Create a file at /etc/udev/rules.d/NN-brother-mfp-brscan5-1.0.2-2.rules with the following content:

udev rules

ACTION!="add", GOTO="brother_mfp_end"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", GOTO="brother_mfp_udev_1"
SUBSYSTEM!="usb_device", GOTO="brother_mfp_end"
LABEL="brother_mfp_udev_1"

ATTRS{idVendor}=="04f9", GOTO="brother_mfp_udev_2"
GOTO="brother_mfp_end"
LABEL="brother_mfp_udev_2"

ATTRS{bInterfaceClass}!="0ff", GOTO="brother_mfp_end"
ATTRS{bInterfaceSubClass}!="0ff", GOTO="brother_mfp_end"
ATTRS{bInterfaceProtocol}!="0ff", GOTO="brother_mfp_end"

MODE="0666"
GROUP="scanner"
ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"
LABEL="brother_mfp_end"

Reload udev rules:

sudo udevadm control --reload && sudo udevadm trigger

Scanner group

You’ll also want to add the user you want doing the scanning to the scanner group.

sudo usermod -aG scanner <username>

Systemd service

I created a systemd service to run brscan-skey at boot.

Create the following at /etc/systemd/system/brscan-skey.service

[Unit]
Description=Brother scan-key-tool

[Service]
User=scott
Type=forking
ExecStart=/opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/brscan-skey
ExecStop=/opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/brscan-skey --terminate

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Run the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now brscan-skey.service

You may need to reboot. I did.

Simple scantofile.sh script

First make a backup of the existing script, just in case.

sudo mv /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantofile.sh /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantofile.sh.bak

Now we create our own version:

sudo vim /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantofile.sh

#! /bin/sh
set +o noclobber

BASE=$HOME/brscan

pdf_name=$(date | sed s/' '/'_'/g | sed s/'\:'/'_'/g)
output_full="$BASE/$pdf_name"

# scan the image in using scanimage
scanimage -x 215.9 -y 279.4 --format=png > "$output_full".png

# Convert to PDF using imagemagick
convert "$output_full".png "$output_full".pdf

echo "Created file $output_full.pdf"

# Cleanup

rm "$output_full".png

My script assumes a lot of things. It assumes that you’re using letter size paper, for one. This was a really quick and dirty hack - maybe I’ll refactor this in the future.

Future goals

My goal for getting this working was to have a small, low power x86 PC that just runs this and nothing else. It’s connected via WiFi so I can put it anywhere, and hopefully make it so that I actually use it.

I have it exposing an NFS share that I’m going to mount as an ingestion folder for Paperless-NGX.

Maybe I’ll create another blog post soon showing how I got that set up.

Fedora 41 and ZFS

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 20:40:18 -0500

Note

ZFS 2.2.7 has been released with up to Linux kernel 6.12 support, so this workaround is no longer necessary. I’ll leave the post up in case this is ever useful in the future.

I previously posted about how to build a desktop OS from the Fedora Server installer.

This is a bit of a follow up to that post.

I’ve now been running Fedora 41 for a few days and it’s been a mostly pleasant experience.

However, I am also an avid ZFS user, and the current stable release of OpenZFS does not support Linux kernel 6.11 yet.

So, being the enterprising fellow that I am, I chose to build ZFS 2.3.0 RC3 from source using the official instructions

That went well, but one thing that tripped me up (and caused some issues for specific applications like syncthing, which keeps it’s local database in the user’s home directory) is that when you do this, unlike when you install zfsutils-linux on Ubuntu, it doesn’t set up the automatic import and mounting of your pool.

It took some digging around to find the correct process, because it seems to be a bit different between the official ZFS source and the one that ships with Ubuntu, but here’s what wound up working for me:

First, go through and enable the following services:

sudo systemctl enable zfs.target zfs-mount.target zfs-import.target zfs-import-cache.service

There are plenty of posts online telling you that you should create your cache file in /etc/zfs/zfs-list-cache/, but this is wrong (or at least outdated. I’m not sure if that location is Ubuntu specific?)

The ACTUAL location of the cache file (which you can see if you actually read through the systemd unit file for zfs-import-cache.service) is /usr/local/etc/zfs.

If the file doesn’t exist, create it.

sudo touch /usr/local/etc/zfs/zpool.cache

Import your pool.

sudo zpool import poolname

If you print out the cache file now it should no longer be empty.

cat /usr/local/etc/zfs/zpool.cache

Next time you reboot your pools should automatically mount and mount all filesystems.

And yes, I did cross post this over on the PracticalZFS forum.

How to build up Fedora Server Edition to a desktop

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 16:44:53 -0500

How to build up Fedora Server Edition to a desktop

In this article I’ll go over how to take the Fedora Server Edition image and build it up into a full desktop.

1. Download the Fedora Server Edition ISO.

Download the latest .iso (DVD) release from here.

Burn it to a USB stick using whichever method you prefer, and boot into it.

2. Set Software Selections to custom

Once in the Fedora installer, the first step we want to take is to go into “Software Selections” and set it to “custom” instead of the Server Edition.

The “Server Edition” option will install the Cockpit web management package along with the OS. Not something I want installed on my desktop, personally, but if you think that’s something you’d like to have, go for it. It will make no difference to the rest of the process.

3. Create disk partitions.

Enter the partition layout editor and select “custom”.

For the “New mount points” dropdown, pick btrfs.

Click the plus button to create a new partition.

We will create a single partition of 1GB for the EFI bootloader, leaving the rest for the OS and user data.

Set the mountpoint of this partition to /boot/efi, and check the box to reformat the disk. This will allow you to select the “EFI System Partition” type.

For the rest of the disk, create a single btrfs partition.

We will subdivide this using btrfs subvolumes.

Use the + button to create 4 more “partitions”, though since we’ve already occupied the entire disk these will be subvolumes instead of partitions. You can see this by looking on the right side under the “Volume” dropdown. By default the btrfs volume name is “fedora”.

There’s no real reason to change this, so we’ll leave it alone.

For the first subvolume, give it a mount point of / and change the name from root to @.
For the second subvolume, the mount point will be /home and the name will be @home.
Subvolume 3 will be mounted at /var/log and called @log.
Subvolume 4 will be mounted at /.snapshots and called @.snapshots.

Following these naming conventions will allow us to use the timeshift snapshotting tool, as it expects the Ubuntu btrfs naming conventions, as I’ve used here.

If you wish to create any more subvolumes, you can do so now, but that’s enough for me.

Here’s what it should look like at the end:

Keep in mind that if you’d like to use a different layout than the one I used here, or if you’d like to put your /home partition on a different disk entirely, that’s entirely OK.

Just keep in mind - you need at least a root partition / and an EFI partition /boot/efi.

4. Create a user

I recommend creating a user at this point with superuser privileges. You can also, if you wish, enable the root account and give it a password, but I won’t bother.

5. Finish the installation

At this point you can proceed with installing the OS.

Once the installation is done, reboot your machine and log into your new operating system.

6. Install updates

You’ll be greeted with a command line only interface. Don’t worry, we’ll fix that in a moment.

First, run the below command and get any pending updates out of the way.

Reboot may or may not be necessary if there’s not a new kernel.

sudo dnf upgrade && sudo reboot now

7. Install software.

I don’t use a typical desktop environment, I use SwayWM, but I do use GDM as my display manager, so we’ll be installing a few Gnome packages.

If you wish to install Gnome instead of Sway, you can use the following command:

sudo dnf group install gnome

Install SwayWM

sudo dnf group install swaywm

Install the Gnome Display Manager (GDM)

This package will handle our login sessions and give us the nice login screen to log into Sway with.

sudo dnf install gdm

Set default systemd target

Right now, the multi-user.target is the default systemd target on login.

If we want our GUI to start upon boot, we need to make this graphical.target instead.

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

Install recommended packages

These packages can be useful if we need to build anything from source, or if you use anything like Neovim with nvim-treesitter.

sudo dnf install make automake gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel tar unzip

Install the RPMFusion repos and media codecs.

Red Hat does not bundle these codecs with Fedora, so if you want hardware decoding for H264 and H265 (and you do), run this command to take care of all of that.

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf group install multimedia sound-and-video

If the above command doesn’t work for some reason, try running another sudo dnf upgrade.

For some reason the first time I added the rpmfusion repos, the multimedia group wasn’t available until after I ran that.

Extra Goodies

Set dark GTK theme by default:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'

Most GTK applications will respect this and avoid the eye-rending white backgrounds.

Update 2024/12/24

You probably also want to install some fonts. After writing this post, I discovered that Fedora Server is missing a Dingbats font that contains specific symbols.

You can get this by installing a font like Symbola.

I also recommend installing a Nerd Font like FiraCode from the Nerd Font website..

You can put them in a few different locations:

/usr/share/fonts
/usr/local/share/fonts
~/.local/share/fonts

Personally, I like installing them to /usr/local/share/fonts so that they’re available to all users on the system. (Even though I’m typically the only user on my systems.)

Download the font zip file.

sudo unzip font.zip -d /usr/local/share/fonts/
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/share/fonts/font*.ttf

Start and enable GDM

sudo systemctl enable gdm && sudo systemctl start gdm

This will kick you over to the Gnome Display Manager and allow you to log into any desktop environments or Wayland compositors you may have installed.

If you’re using Gnome, it will be a very basic installation without any packages to speak of besides the absolute necessities, but this is why we install things from the server edition - to get a more minimal install without bloat.

I’ve also created a script to make the process of getting things to a full desktop simpler - feel free to use it as a base!

Fedora setup script gist