Considering the ASUS C201PA

[Wesman26]

Howdy folks,

I've been looking to replace a netbook I had that fried a month back or so and as such I'm considering the ASUS C201PA chromebook. It seems to share the same RK3288 Rockchip that the C100P has, as well as the Mali graphics chip, so I'm hopeful it can be done. Anybody try this? Any success?

[summers]

Interesting question, its arm cortex-a17 which is armv7. Rockwell chip seems supported, so main question is how it boots. Means you'll probably have to do some investigations into how it boots, and set things up in the right way. Hopefully it has something like uboot for booting, that can be diverted to do arm arch instead.

The mali graphics, IIRC doesn't yet have an open source 3d graphics - seem to recall it was being worked on. Anyway though I expect that 2d can be brought up - hmmm would need a basic kernel driver - and I don't recall one, but then again havn't looked.

So gut feeling, it may or may not work, if may or may not be some effort to get to work, but it would be a fun game trying ...

[Wesman26]

Thanks for the response! The advanced section of the C100P makes mention of the xf86-video-armsoc-rockchip X.org video driver and veyron-libgl driver (for Mali EGL and GLES support). If nothing else it ought to be able to run X which would be a nice perk, so I think my main concern ought to be whether it uses the same boot processes. Seems they ought to be the same, but who knows. I'll probably end up getting it anyway, and I can post results back here. Worst case scenario I can use chrome os to ssh into some of the arch systems I have running headless at home.

[WarheadsSE]

The C201PA is essentially identical HW to the flip, and works with the same instructions as the rest of the Veyron family.

[Wesman26]

You, sir, are the king. Thank you very much!

[Wesman26]

Official confirmation. Arch Linux ARM is up and running on my C201PA via the instructions found here. So far so good.