Pulled right from the e-waste pile - Chromebook from 2012 lives again

I'm on a mission, my friends.

You see, I had a little Linux server running CNCJS for years, and it worked beautifully. I could operate my CNC machine — for guitar making, in case that’s not clear — using my freaking phone. But here, where weather is anything but friendly, humidity and bad electricity eventually did their thing.

The two little Orange Pi boards are still alive and seem to be working fine. Maybe the display on one of them has a case of the “don’t touch it,” but the other one works. That said, it was always a bit of a hassle whenever I had to troubleshoot. You see, I was running them headless — which is a clever way of saying I had no monitor. If everything was working, I could log in remotely and do my finagling, but if the network went down… well, it became a process.

Months ago, I told myself: when my CNC computer breaks, I’m getting something better. Something I can troubleshoot easily, even without a network connection. The only reasonable solution would be to use a laptop to operate the machine — but that would require a sacrifice to the Dust God, and I’m not too keen on that sort of ritual.

However, a few months back, my mom gave me her old Chromebook.
“It doesn’t work,” she said.
I accepted her words as truth, stashed it in my toy pile, and figured one day I’d strip it for parts. The monitors can be useful after all, even if the rest is barely worth anything.

But yesterday, I decided to try powering it on. And what do you know? It worked.

It booted straight into ChromeOS — which I compare to having an ingrown toenail and then playing soccer — but it was working. I guess what my mother really meant was that it showed a message saying the device was no longer supported. Of course, a Chromebook that’s 12 years old is ancient by tech standards. But maybe, just maybe, this little device still has one job left in it. It barely needs a fan — the thing runs so cool because it’s so weak — so maybe it’ll survive in the shop with nothing more than a cloth over it for “the dust.”

Is it a perfect solution? Maybe not. But if I can squeeze another year out of this e-waste my mom was basically gifting me to butcher, I think I’ve won. And I win twice — I get to play with toys, flashing the BIOS, and installing an OS I’ve never tried before (GalliumOS), and I get my CNC back up and running. Not that I have any custom builds in the pipeline, but you never know.

Now, I’m not going to recommend people turn their old Chromebooks into Linux machines — unless you actually enjoy this kind of techie nonsense. It takes patience, following instructions, and learning Linux. I’ve even seen some people swap ChromeOS for Windows, which in my opinion is meh at best.

Hopefully, the next time I respond to anyone here, it will be from GalliumOS.

Cheers, my friends.

MenO