Chromebox

I recently stumbled across the ASUS CHROMEBOX-M004U. It’s a Chromebox, which is cool in its own right, but I was interested in using it’s dual-core Celeron Haswell CPU, expandable RAM (up to 16GB), and M2 Sata storage for other purposes.

First things first, you’ve got to enable the box to run things other than ChromeOS… Thankfully that’s well documented ( http://kodi.wiki/view/ASUS_Chromebox ), so I won’t go into detail at this time. But I will say, I used the standalone, custom coreboot firmware and chose the headless option, as my current planned use cases are for servers. Apparently you want non-headless if you plan to use the box as a Plex Home Theater or Kodi box. Oh, also, I set it to boot first from USB if  available.