I keep being surprised that there is no real ARM netbook (samsung's chromebook and asus transformer come closest).
I think the reason is because ARM is significantly less performant than x86. You don't notice it on a phone/tablet, because the stack is optimised (it has to be!) the special-purpose OS, lots of stuff in silicon (esp video), games and (mobile) webpages are written for the platform. But for general computation - e.g. compiling - it's much slower.
ARM has optimised power consumption for decades; x86 has optimised performance for decades, so I shouldn't be surprised.
PS: doesn't ubuntu have an ARM laptop in the works? (along the lines of their EDGE phone)?
Presumably MSFT will be having a firesale now they've realized that Windows RT was a bad idea. All we need is someone to work out how to root them, and then cheap A9-based quad-core laptops for running Linux.
The next challenge is getting KVM working. The Chromebook has an A15 chip which has hardware assisted virtualization. Unfortunately the firmware disables HYP mode, but the Xen guys managed to workaround this in their bootloader so it should be possible for KVM too.
Another note about the Chromebook is it is not possible to boot it from an external hard drive. You have to boot it from USB flash although after boot you can of course use a real hard drive as the root filesystem.
No, the firmware doesn't disable Hyp mode; it just starts the kernel in Secure-SVC, rather than in Hyp mode. It's pretty trivial to get from Secure-SVC to Hyp in the bootloader before starting the kernel -- there are u-boot patches floating about which do it.
As far as I can tell the main issue with the Chromebook is that there's no one organization who's taking responsibility for making sure fixes and changes like this get upstream, so every distro/person ends up reinventing or locally maintaining patches.
All of these "install ... on Chromebook" articles fail to mention that on recent Chromebooks without a physical developer mode switch (Samsung's ARM-based one, Pixel) you have to press a specific hidden keyboard combination and endure the big scary "developer mode" warning on each boot. In my view that makes it practically useless for day-to-day use as a general purpose laptop.
You can flash the first stage bootloader to remove that warning, but that is not documented well (if you can call several contradictory forum threads documentation), involves taking the laptop apart and gives you exactly one try: it either works or bricks the device permanently.
In addition to that, at least Samsung's Chromebooks are not very well designed and can be seriously damaged from userspace when running a general-purpose distribution (Google for burning speakers on ARM Chromebook for instance)
Agree with all your points. On the other hand, these are cheap, widely available A15 devices with a reasonable amount of RAM, and that has a certain appeal for people who need ARM-based developer machines (we used them for porting Fedora, KVM, libvirt, libguestfs and the virt tools to ARM).
Also I used one for 2+ weeks exclusively (running Fedora 18) and it wasn't that bad:
The developer mode warning only occurs on boot, as you say. Having owned by the ARM Chromebook and the Pixel since both were released, I've probably seen that warning less than 8 times since install. The Chromebooks very rarely need to be turned off, and the one time that does happen often, on update restarts, actually bypasses that warning.
It really depends what you want to do. If you just run a chroot inside the stock ChromeOS then what you say is true.
But if you're dual-booting to another Linux distribution or just replace ChromeOS altogether (that's another issue with the linked article: what it describes is not a dual-boot) you can't escape frequent reboots. Especially due to flaky suspend/sleep mode support in other distros.
On regular laptops, you open the lid and press the "On" button.
On my Chromebook, it boots as soon as you open the lid, and so I press Ctrl-D instead of the "On" button. I thought it'd be a pain, but it doesn't bother me at all, and you say that makes it "practically useless"?
One more finger annoying than the power button which is what you would do on any other laptop. There is not a desktop Linux user alive who has not put up with more annoying things than hitting two keys to boot.
The problem is that it's not just ^D on every boot, it's "press space twice in a thirty-second window and it will unceremoniously wipe all your data without a timeout." This will happen the moment you hand your computer to somebody of the sort who clicks through dialogs they don't ubderdtand, as the computer shuts off when it's slept for long enough.
(The infuriating bit is how difficult it is to enter developer mode: two very secret keypresses and a thirty-second "please reconsider" grace period.)
I am typing this on the Pixel that's been my main machine since I/O in May. Yeah, that screen is minorly annoying, but it goes away with one keystroke - not a dealbreaker.
Can't say I'm bothered either. It might concern me if I were recommending a Pixel with regular Linux on it to a non-power user... but I wouldn't do that anyway.
>Btw, on Pixel you don’t have this physical switch. You can just use a keyboard combination: Press and hold the Esc and Refresh keys while you hit the Power button
That's not quite what he is talking about. With the Pixel every single time you boot (not just when you initially put it into Developer Mode before installation) you are greeted with a nice big warning label about OS verification and you need to press Ctrl-L to kick it into SeaBIOS so that Grub can be kicked off.
It turns on and off as normal after installation, you just need to hit Ctrl-L mid-boot each time. I reboot infrequently enough that this hasn't annoyed me yet.
I just did this last night on my Samsung Chromebook. One problem I immediately ran into was the difficulty of getting programs to run in Ubuntu because of my ARM processor. Any suggestions?
Ah, okay. I'm wondering if I should ditch this one and pick up an Intel-based Chromebook instead.
I actually just need a cheap solution to program in this year, and I'd love to step away from Windows and start using Linux (since OS X is outside of my price point). Any suggestions?
Tried Crouton on my Acer C7 Chromebook a few months back, and it was buggy as hell. Switched to the Chrubuntu script, and it's been a dream. I'm surprised it's not mentioned at all.
Things seem better now. I remember bricking the original beta google chromebook that google gave out for testing because of following murky instructions.
Me, I have a long running ARM fetish ever since debian-ising my NSLU2 back in the day. Also for some sick reason I like to repurpose stuff.
All that said - it turns out ChromeOS with developer access enabled (so I can get a proper shell and a normal ssh client) covers about 80% of my needs in a client machine.
Have had Ubuntu on my ARM chromebook since late last year. Only issue so far is that the version of Slim dm that is available for it from the 12.04 repos is b0rked and doesn't speak to consolekit properly, resulting in all sorts of hard to diagnose fun with reboot and other permissions.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadI think the reason is because ARM is significantly less performant than x86. You don't notice it on a phone/tablet, because the stack is optimised (it has to be!) the special-purpose OS, lots of stuff in silicon (esp video), games and (mobile) webpages are written for the platform. But for general computation - e.g. compiling - it's much slower.
ARM has optimised power consumption for decades; x86 has optimised performance for decades, so I shouldn't be surprised.
PS: doesn't ubuntu have an ARM laptop in the works? (along the lines of their EDGE phone)?
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-s...
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F19/Remixes... http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chro...
The next challenge is getting KVM working. The Chromebook has an A15 chip which has hardware assisted virtualization. Unfortunately the firmware disables HYP mode, but the Xen guys managed to workaround this in their bootloader so it should be possible for KVM too.
Another note about the Chromebook is it is not possible to boot it from an external hard drive. You have to boot it from USB flash although after boot you can of course use a real hard drive as the root filesystem.
http://www.virtualopensystems.com/media/chromebook/chromeboo... is probably a good place to start if you want to tinker.
As far as I can tell the main issue with the Chromebook is that there's no one organization who's taking responsibility for making sure fixes and changes like this get upstream, so every distro/person ends up reinventing or locally maintaining patches.
You can flash the first stage bootloader to remove that warning, but that is not documented well (if you can call several contradictory forum threads documentation), involves taking the laptop apart and gives you exactly one try: it either works or bricks the device permanently.
In addition to that, at least Samsung's Chromebooks are not very well designed and can be seriously damaged from userspace when running a general-purpose distribution (Google for burning speakers on ARM Chromebook for instance)
Also I used one for 2+ weeks exclusively (running Fedora 18) and it wasn't that bad:
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/some-thoughts-after-2-5...
But if you're dual-booting to another Linux distribution or just replace ChromeOS altogether (that's another issue with the linked article: what it describes is not a dual-boot) you can't escape frequent reboots. Especially due to flaky suspend/sleep mode support in other distros.
On my Chromebook, it boots as soon as you open the lid, and so I press Ctrl-D instead of the "On" button. I thought it'd be a pain, but it doesn't bother me at all, and you say that makes it "practically useless"?
I do mind having to do them each and every time I pick up the computer, especially when I have bought it believing that I won't have to.
(The infuriating bit is how difficult it is to enter developer mode: two very secret keypresses and a thirty-second "please reconsider" grace period.)
Source: The article you're commenting on
It turns on and off as normal after installation, you just need to hit Ctrl-L mid-boot each time. I reboot infrequently enough that this hasn't annoyed me yet.
If you're trying x86/wine then forget it. But the usual suspects are available from the ubuntu repos just fine.
I actually just need a cheap solution to program in this year, and I'd love to step away from Windows and start using Linux (since OS X is outside of my price point). Any suggestions?
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2013/05/chrubuntu-one-scri...
All that said - it turns out ChromeOS with developer access enabled (so I can get a proper shell and a normal ssh client) covers about 80% of my needs in a client machine.