technology

Hey smokers, ~~Druaga1~~ Łumało here. I'm writing this mostly to take the edge of stress due to me failing this semester most likely. Anyway, I'm gonna tell you lovely fuckers how I've turned a shitty Chromebox into a media center under my TV.

Like all tales, this one begins scrolling through Allegro for small, cheap PCs with HDMI and HDMI-Audio capability. Lo and behold I've struck gold.

An HP Chromebox CB1, an absolute stinker with only 4GB of RAM, 16GB of SSD storage, and an Intel Celeron 2995U.

Best part? It was only 125zł (~$34.14 as of time_t now = time(NULL)) and it had the power supply included. The only problem was that the little shit is a chromebox. Still, it is x86_64 because of the Intel CPU so I thought something could be done and started looking.

That's how I've come across MrChromebox and his docs (dot tech), who is apparently the guy in this shit. Thank you MrChromebox you're a champ. Anyway, in the supported devices section there it was!

Keep in mind, MrChromebox only supports Intel based CPUs and he doesn't recommend to get a Chromebox specifically to run Windows or Linux.

Still fuck that as apparently Haswell devices are 100% functional, so I can remove the terrible, proprietary Google bullshit, and replace it with Coreboot for proper UEFI support and turn the fucker into a proper little PC. Fuck yes! Now ummm, onto that CPU... Will it even decode 1080p video without fucking choking to death? So I checked intel documentation on it.

Ok, "Clear Video Technology". Thanks for all the marketing buzz but WTF am I exactly looking at here? Unfortunately after digging for way too fucking much because Intel sucks at cataloging their documentation and search engines suck dick, I've found this which confirms it has hardware h.264 decoding. So as long as I torrent the right ~~media~~ Linux ISOs, it's gonna be fine.

So I decided then to buy it, and start working on it. Even if the fucker was still enrolled I could've just gotten a refund. Now the easy part was getting into the developer mode and flashing the firmware as the guide and procedure itself are really good, simple and pretty much foolproof.

At that point it was just a normal computer so I went for Debian, so far it has never let me down. Everything, and I mean everything including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth worked, except one thing. HDMI-Audio, the thing I bought it for. So I got to debugging.

No audio was something to expect as that was mentioned in the guide, but 1. the audio jack worked and 2. the HDMI output was detected and used by ALSA. It simply gave no output. So I tried the script they recommend to fixing audio.

It didn't work.

My board was simply not supported, being google_beltino or something like that, and when looking into the script, yeah it simply wasn't there. WTF. And after way too much googling, I've found one answer somewhere that I've already lost the link to. Haswell CPUs simply don't need the script, the audio is supported out of the box, just like previously mentioned that they are indeed 100% functional. I was simply out of ideas, on what to debug next. Until I thought to maybe ditch Debian, the Chrultrabook docs don't have it recommended, maybe for a reason. Fuck it, let's try EndeavourOS.

Everything works out of the box, including HDMI-Audio.

Yippee!!! All that was left, was to install Kodi and watch some fucking House M.D. baybeeeeeeeee!!!