Shiny and Chrome

A little while ago, Tyler went dumpster diving and managed to surface with a haul of old chromeboxes. He kept a few of them for himself, assembling them into some sort of linux cluster with which he intends to calculate some kind of digital unholy sins, but set aside for me a pair of them that he didn't need.

More after the break.

These are the Asus Chromebox CN62 which is apparently a model designed specifically for business use, marketed for offices, digital signage, kiosks and so on. I believe these particular units were used for video conferencing.

Someone had apparently already tinkered with them before dropping them onto Tyler's head as he was rummaging around in the refuse, as they already had the Mr Chromebox firmware loaded onto them, which would allow for installing any random linux distribution, should one desire to do so.

They also stripped out the RAM and only left one 32G SSD between the two units. So, let's at least solve one of those problems and see how far we get.

Now some lowly peasants out there might be satisfied with regular memory, but my refined tastes demand that only premium memory be used.

And luckily the premium memory fits in the slots just fine. I was a little shocked at the price, though: these 16G kits were... $17 each at the fine House of Bezos. I mean damn, I remember when 16G of RAM cost a small fortune, but now even the premium stuff is going for pennies.

Anyway, I also need some way to power these boxes, so a quick trip to the Bay of Es yielded a pair of appropriate power supplies.

And with all that together we have...

.... curiously no signs of life. But after a few more reboots I managed to get ChromeOS Flex to start up and install itself onto the one, singular SSD.

And in case you're wondering: no, the screen isn't actually this blue. I have no idea why, but my iPhone kind of freaked out when taking pictures of this TV and blue itself up. This will become a theme in this post, so just try to imagine the display having normal, ordinary colours.

Colours aside, things are looking good.

And ChromeOS Flex is successfully installed.

So we're good to go with step 2.

Giving these things actual storage.

These are 256G NVMe drives, which are again shockingly inexpensive.

I went with NVMe since I figured they'd be just that little bit quicker, and because it says right here on the official specs page for the CN62 that NVMe is fully supported.

It also says the system only supports up to 4GB of RAM and I'm running with 16GB but whatever I'm sure it's fine.

It was not fine.

But you know what is fine? M.2 SATA SSDs, which cost basically the same amount and I'll never notice the performance difference anyway.

As we can see, these SATA SSDs have B+M keying. The M.2 socket on the Chromeboxes should have had B+M keying if they only supported SATA, but for whatever reason the socket was M-keyed, which is supposed to mean it supports NVMe, but well here we are.

Anyway, this time ChromeOS can find the drive and install itself.

Curiously, this SSD has a bright blue activity LED on it.

Whereas the other, supposedly identical one, does not.

Which is a wonderful reassurance that I'm actually getting some kind of known quantity here and not just randomly rebadged overstock crap.

Oh well, the important thing is that they seem to work.

I mean it's not actually a Chromebook but you do you, ChromeOS Flex.

And speaking of doing you, it's apparently time to update, because downloading the latest installer image doesn't give me a particularly "latest" OS build.

But once we reboot into the updated version we can... oh.

But once THAT one is done installing, then we can use it, right?

Ok but after resetting the TPM, then I can use it, right?

There we go, finally. Now to load up my home security monitor page and plug it into my other TV.

Which also photographs extremely blue.

Eventually I'm going to build a nice picture frame type box for these two TVs so I can wall mount them and make them blend in with the decor (sort of), but for now this one is just kind of leaning up against my hall table.

But that aside, I can finally retire my poor, old, long-suffering ChromeBit.

It's time to rest now, and dream of your new life in silicon heaven, where all the dead calculators go.