Hacking the Lenovo 11e Chromebook

by Archilles

A little history on myself.

I was born in the mid-1980s and I grew up in the late-1980s and early-1990s when the Internet began to be a big deal and portable computers became a thing.  I remember watching cartoons and movies with tablet computers, thinking about how much I wished they were real.  Now they are, and everyone seems to have a smart phone in their pocket.  The smart phones are faster and have more memory than the super computers when I was little!

In my late teens, I began thinking of a career in computers.  I built systems/servers, ran a BBS, and installed multiple forms of BSD and Linux.  I tried making a business of it in the early-2000s, but there just weren't enough customers in my small town to keep me busy.

Since that time I have worked in many fields and had many jobs, but I have always dabbled in computers as a hobby - learning a bit of programming, working on hardware, and just generally hacking things back together, converting them for purposes other than originally intended.

That leads us to the present time.  I was on an online classifieds site and ran across a fellow that had 30 Lenovo 11e Chromebooks for sale.  He told me he'd sell me six for $120 and, at $20 apiece, I couldn't turn them down!

Now I'd like to point out that I have had absolutely zero experience with Chromebooks or ChromeOS.  I don't like Google and so I have always avoided their products when I can.  Had I done my research, I would have known that Google is very good at protecting their proprietary systems, and they really don't want another operating system to be able to be installed on a Chromebook.  Google mines data.  That's their business.  If you can hide information from them, it cuts into their profit.

So I spent the next three days banging my head against the Google wall.  I could access the developer mode, but I couldn't boot a bootable USB stick.  So I researched that and found that I needed to re-flash the BIOS just to run a bootable Linux distribution.  So I attempted that from the developer mode in the shell.  It threw up a password prompt and asked for the root password!  There was no root password set; I had wiped the system multiple times by this point and I didn't set a root password intentionally.  But, no matter, the Chromebook had other ideas.

I went to bed.

The next morning (Day Two), I started researching again.  I found a post where somebody had tried to install Linux on a Chromebook and mentioned a "Write Protect Screw."  Those three words sent me off to the Internet again looking for a service manual on the little 11e.  It took me a while to find the service manual, but when I did there it was: an illustration of the laptop with the keyboard and all the exterior plastic removed, the write protect screw clearly illustrated on the motherboard right above the power button.

Only accessible by a near complete disassembly of the entire computer!

I took the back cover off, then removed the battery and the screws for the keyboard and front bezel.  I carefully removed the front bezel, taking care to disconnect the two or three ribbon cables that link the bezel and touchpad to the main board.  After that, I had a bare frame with the motherboard exposed, it was a simple thing to find the write protect screw.  The write protect screw will probably be the only one that has two contact pads under it.  The screw bridges an electrical connection just like a switch would, and removing the screw switches the continuity off.  Once the screw was removed, it was a simple matter of reversing the disassembly order.  It seems like that shouldn't be to difficult, but there are over a dozen screws of various sizes and thread patterns that must go back in the correct order.  Fortunately, many of them are labeled as the same and that makes it easier to find a pattern in the madness.

Once the machine was reassembled, I powered the system on in developer mode once again and punched in the command to re-flash the BIOS.  Success!

The BIOS install went perfectly, and I proceeded to reboot with a Linux Mint 20 bootable USB drive (what I had on hand).  It ran Mint just fine.  Wi-Fi and all other hardware seemed to work out of the box.  The only thing it lacked was sound.  Before I began tracing down the sound issue, I decided to see if there were any Chromebook specific Linux distros available.

I found GalliumOS, and it seemed to be what I was looking for, so I downloaded the version for my processor and attempted to run it.  Everything worked perfectly after booting the stick.  So I set it to install.  After installing everything, it failed when setting up GRUB.  I tried it a couple more times - same fail.

I went to bed.

The next day (Day Three), I did some more research and found that some people that installed GalliumOS reported the same or similar issues to mine.  One of the fixes mentioned was to disable networking and updating during the install.  I did that and it worked!  GalliumOS installed fully and everything worked as it should have.

The little Lenovo 11e is an excellent carry around laptop, coding laptop, or hacking machine.  It plays movies well and has a good keyboard, even though it doesn't have all the keys that it should.  In fact, I am typing this article on the very machine that I am writing about while listening to Pandora.  Not only does this take one more listening device out of commission, it keeps the 11e out of the landfill for a while yet anyway.

I encourage everyone to go out into the world and subvert at least one or two Google devices!
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