[GTALUG] good deal on netbook; war story: putting Fedora on it

[Chris Tyler]

The current Chromebooks will run a Linux userspace sandboxed very nicely *right
out of the box, *neither crouton nor dev mode required. I have a Samsung
Chromebook Plus (gen 1, with the high-dpi screen -- watch out for gen 2
where they dropped to 1080 (and also regressed from ARM to Intel)) and the
LInux userspace (Debian) is fabulous -- full development toolchain
(including gdb etc), X window and wayland app support, and so on. The
environments are semi-integrated -- there's a separate directory in the
ChromeOS "Files" application that maps to $HOME in the sandbox/container,
but any graphical apps you install into the sandbox show up on the ChromeOS
main menu (e.g., LibreOffice, Gimp, Eschema, and so forth). Apparently
deeper integration is coming; releases in the pipeline include the ability
to do things like mount your Google Drive filesystem within the sandbox.

My wife has a Pixelbook (top-end Chromebook, gorgeous build with glass
trackpad etc - I gave her the nice machine this time ;-) and the Linux
userspace is supposed to work really well there, but I haven't tried it yet.

-Chris


On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 3:41 PM Christopher Browne via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 22:53, William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> wrote:
> > Just curious... Where/how do you use these little computers?  I mean,
> > $300 here, $200 there, $100 upgrade, $50 ram, $25 microSD, etc. they all
> > add up.
>
> I have been carrying around a Chromebook running Linux-y bits via Crouton
> for 3.5+ years now; it's coming towards the end of its lifespan, and only
> cost me a bit past $200, with no extras adding up.
>
> Quoting my own email from 2015-03-15 on this list...
>
> "I'm liking my Samsung ARM-based Chromebook well enough; I'm running
> Debian "in behind" via the Crouton layer, which has been working fine.
> I'll bet that by the time I care for something more, there will be a
> newer model with more storage, memory, and CPU than I presently have."
>
> It's 2018, and the reason I'm looking for something newer mostly has to do
> with the fact that such a cheap laptop has a fairly fragile case, so it's
> beginning to age a bit ungracefully.  That something newer has
> greater capacity is fine.
> --
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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