Linux support for ChromeOS has been great. But the “Beta” moniker has always been a bit concerning. Google I/O this year claims that it was going to be out of beta soon. Although suppose to happen by may, I just noticed it with ChromeOS release 92 this month. Great news alongside my CKA accomplishment!
I encourage anyone who is even modestly technical to give the Linux ChromeOS experience a try The most important item is that, unlike the rest of the ChromeOS experience, anything done on the Linux layer and it’s apps are not automatically backed up.
A few months ago I noticed a weird issue on the Chromebook where it would reboot hard if I performed a dd operation to write a Linux distro out to USB. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Browsing around the crouton source code for an unrelated project, I came across this section of code that explains the issue. The Chromebook OS has the hunk_task_panic timer set for 2 minutes.
The ChromeOS has been a great experience so far. One problem, however, is that you generally need to purchase a Chromebook to use it, or go through compiling the ChromeOS from source. A few days ago I came across Neverware’s CloudReady, which provides an freely available (to individuals) ChromeOS experience on generic hardware.
Cloudready, however, does not support dual boot, so it will wipe away anything on the machine. Following some hints from this page I was able to get the CloudReady to install on a Virtualbox VM, without the need to create a USB bootable drive.
I’m still compiling my large list of tasks, and hope to break them out blog posts/wiki documents. But the coolest thing I’ve come across so far is that the Chromebook can open up Rar files! Rar compressed files are not too common, but nice to know it’s one less item I’ll have to depend on another machine to perform.
Due to the alignment of some stars financially, I went out and obtained a Chromebook for practically free! Specifically I am getting a Toshiba Chromebook 2. Although I tend to lean more toward open source OSes and non-cloud services, I want to explore the feasibility of actually using a lightweight laptop for regular purposes. Specifically I will be focusing around three use cases:
Normal End User Tasks. Sysadmin Tasks. Development Tasks.