I found a AOPEN Chromebox and was curious to know what I could run on it.

It is my first encounter with the Chromebox/Chromebook ecosystem. I was a bit lost at first.
Some Google search and I landed on MrChromebox.tech which provided a good guide.

The unit is AOpen Chromebox Commercial, board name NINJA. The WP screw is the one in the middle. The recovery button is on the back.

I was able to confirm the model by entering recovery mode.

I followed the instruction to enter developer mode by disabling OS Verification.

With OS Verification Disabled, I booted the device but developer mode was restricted.

The device owner has disabled Developer Mode for this Device.

By disabling the OS verification, it seemed that the system was partially reset. I was prompted to setup the device (Connect Network/Wifi, Enter Google Account).

Before continuing with account setup, I performed a system restore. I made a recovery drive from Linux.

With the system restored, I login on the chromebox. The system run ok, however unit is EOL, the browser is out of date and does not more recent feature (No Chrome Extension, No Google Meet, ... ). Not a big loss to change the OS to Linux.

I was considering flashing the unit SPI flash with an external programmer.

I went thru the steps to enable developer mode once more. This time it worked. I guess login in the unit clear some things.

I was very impressed by how effective MrChromebox.tech Firmware Utility Script was.
It cleared the Flash Software Write Protect. It made a backup of the existing firmware. It flash a UEFI firmware.

I was able to run Ubuntu (a bit heavy) and OpenWRT (Like a charm).

I wish that unit had USB 3.0 port to add a 1GB Ethernet USB dongle.