How schools around the country are turning dead PCs into speedy Chromebooks | Hacker News Reader

How schools around the country are turning dead PCs into speedy Chromebooks

theverge.com

70 pointsnols53 comments

It's interesting that they did this with laptops.

The SF Bay Area has OTX West[1], which takes broken desktop computers and swaps parts to make a smaller number of working computers, which they then distribute to schools. Their new, modernized, mobile-friendly no-useful-information site doesn't tell you much, but last year's site has a useful FAQ.[2] As of 2015, they provided Windows 7 desktops with LibreOffice. They have a deal with Microsoft which allows them to do OEM installs of Windows on old Windows computers.

If you have old computers to unload, send them to OTX West in Oakland.

[1] http://www.otxwest.org [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150226174001/http://www.otxwes...

I actually mentor at one of the schools mentioned in the article (Academy for Software Engineering in Manhattan). Really cool to see it featured here since they incorporate CS into their curriculum throughout all four years of high-school. If you're in the NYC area I would encourage you to check out iMentor and get involved with the school... They're always looking for more mentors!

I have an old netbook that came with Windows but runs Lubuntu now. Why the excitement about Chrome OS compared to other resource-light Linux distros? I can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the Chrome OS software plus a bunch of other Linux software too?

I don't understand why Chrome OS is considered to be something revolutionary.

> I can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the Chrome OS software

No, Chrome on Linux does not include all features of Chrome OS. (At least, IIRC, based on Google Chrome release blog posts with Chrome-OS-only features identified.)

Aside from proprietary codecs and DRM, what exactly does ChromeOS implement that Chrome does not?

Ease of use from an administration perspective. Google provides great tools for admins to be able to manage fleets of chromebooks.

From your average user's perspective, it also generally looks nicer than lxde and other lightweight DEs (though that's entirely subjective).

For technical users, there's probably not a good reason not to just use a lightweight linux distro, but technical users aren't really their target audience.

> No, Chrome on Linux does not include all features of Chrome OS.

Hmm. I'm not aware of any unique features in a chromebook. I use a chromebook pixel as my all-day dev machine and I use chromixium (linux with fake chrome desktop) on my two older machines. I've been able to do whatever I wanted on all three.

Wish they would have used ubuntu desktop instead of chrome os, but glad to hear people are doing this.

A friend of mine works in IT for district doing this. They have under a dozen IT staff serving five k-12 schools. In the past he worked in a much larger distinct with a Dell based laptop program.

One of the reasons they love the Chrome system rather than a more traditional install (be it Linux or Windows), is when some clueless student comes in saying: "it broken," the staff can wipe the device clean in a second. The student can log back into the Google services to bring their account back, and they minimize undue downtime to repair software problems created by the students.

Could you get something similar going under an alternative distribution, sure, but with this they're is no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and software.

> no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and software.

There sure is! It's just serviced by Google instead of you, and funded by your students' data instead of money.

So sick of the knee-jerk 'paying by data' argument for EVERY.DAMN.THING.

Google does not do whatever analysis you're claiming on education accounts, btw. Sure, they may be leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid' contracts, but they. are. not. monetizing. student. data. While I am myself a little bit of a cynic, sometimes it pays to tone down on the cynicism and see things in a slightly more positive light.

Is there some agreement from Google not to analyse student computers or are you assuming Google wouldn't stoop so low? Is it a general position for all educational users?

Here is Google's page on it:

https://www.google.com/edu/trust

And it states:

>>No. Google doesn’t assume ownership of any customer data in Google Apps for Education core services, and it says so in our contracts (under “Intellectual Property”).<<

Which only addresses ownership, not usage. On that topic, they claim:

> Google Apps for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ads profiles.

Which leaves a lot of possible other uses on the table.

Claiming ownership of customer data would be way beyond any moral line it's kinda crazy that the company that used to say "don't be evil" needs to say it.

The policy keeps saying things like:

>"Google Apps for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ads profiles."

Just make me wonder, well if they're only promising not to use it for advertising purposes then what use are they making of it; why isn't it just "will not use student data for any purposes without express and explicit permission"?

There are a lot of uses that are benign or beneficial, such as indexing emails for easier searching, etc but having to have an explicit permission prompt for every one of those uses would severly hinder UX

It doesn't need to be a UX thing, just provide an itemized list of the ways in which the data will be used on a page like the one linked.

They choose not to do this, arguably because they know what sort of reactions that list would evoke.

I believe they said somewhere that they don't analyze business accounts (because they are paid) or educational accounts (for the sake of good will).

   No it's simply a long play by    Google today Microsoft almost  has a monopoly in the workplace because of Microsoft office and windows and how people are used to it when they join the workforce.
   Later as more people join the workforce having used Google app more corporations will be will to move to it as the cost of retraining will be less.
  If Google let's students use Google apps without mining their data today they can mine it later when they are not students and join the workforce as adults. And anyway they are selling Google services to recover the costs.

Here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/0...

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Agree on the knee jerk reaction to be very cynical towards everything google does, I'm sure in doing this we miss things that were relatively altruistic (assuming they do those things).

However, leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid' contracts, and exposing their technology, values, and brand to students at an early age is actually has quite a bit of value. It is a profitable long term move, that can have a very big payoff, if they can get people into the walled garden that is google services as early as possible.

The same value that's currently going to google doesn't necessarily get instantly more palatable in Canonical's hands, but if I were to give a student something to learn on (on which they could quite possibly discovery programming, or systems administration), I'd give them the less-locked-down Ubuntu.

This strategy seems like it leaves less of an avenue to create software, than just consume it (from the web).

How do you think Google makes money on random student data? they couldn't monetize MySpace well so I'd consider this data worthless here.

Thank you! I happen to work in the edtech industry, and student privacy is one of those totems that i'm always scratching my head about. All of these edtech companies are always being accused of collecting student data for marketing purposes, but honestly, I don't think homework or attendance records are particularly valuable to anyone but a student, parents, and teachers. I think it's pretty asinine that anyone would think that that type of data is monetizable. I think the problem is really our (as technologists) fault. We tend to refer to any data as data, when we should be specifying what types of data we are referring. Personal details vs activity data vs application analytical data, etc.

I want to note that just because the data doesn't "look" valuable to you now doesn't mean it isn't. There are lots of types of data that didn't seem valuable before people connected some dots and realized they are.

Attendance records could be very valuable. If I can determine trends in what days you attend school, which classes you attend, and with which frequency, I might be able to create an even more specific advertising audience to sell to ad publishers. "high school students who showed affinity for Cooking class" (assuming most high schools even offer a home ec/cooking class) might be a very compelling ad segment to some up-and-coming social baking app or something.

Sorry that's just not how targeted advertising works. Seriously with MySpace you had TONS AND TONS of data about posting history, likes, affinities and such and it made virtually no impact on monetization. Things like attendance are laughably irrelevant to ad dollars.

2 IT staff per school, especially if they're shared across a group of schools, seems quite a lot. How many pupils would they be serving; what would be the main places were the IT personnel were shorthanded?

So are they basically just replacing windows with linux on a bunch of these laptops?

It seems like that is where the biggest success came from: a linux install with a lightweight DE.

I think a major factor to its success was the Google backend making everything substantially simpler and cheaper. People have been putting linux on old hardware to give away for years, but Chromium letting students keep everything "in the cloud" means they can keep the computers secure at the school while students can still access all their files wherever using Google's easier to use infrastructure. It's certainly possible to create something like this using linux and not Google products, but it would be much more expensive and require higher level staffers and better trained users.

Well, why is that? You could have just installed chrome, locked down the OS and everything, and purchased google apps.

It would have been the same thing, with more features. (You could install IDEs for programming classes)

Those are all things someone would have to do, or (more likely) used a management system to do it automatically, while this company does it for a $60 lifetime license. It simplifies things and thus makes it cheaper. It seems like this company originally did what you're suggesting with a server and thin clients, but transitioned to Chromium because that's what the schools want.

> Dan Davenport, the director of technology for the area schools, had looked into using Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome operating system, but was stymied by the complexity of supporting a range of different drivers on a mishmash of old computers.

This seems to be one of the major reasons for going for the product offered by Neverware. Going with Chromium through them they got a working setup with limited configuration and support should anything not work. School IT works on a shoe string budget at the best of times and much less in poor districts so the time costs of figuring out how to install and configure the laptops they had isn't trivial. Then they have to be able to support them and setup processes to restore them easily.

I guess your and nols response do make sense from a operations perspective.

Being right up front: this article smells like an advertising piece. But, taken at face value this desktop environment sounds like a good match because it's both user-friendly and easy for their IT staff to manage, which is not a trivial thing for Linux.

I've had good luck with lightweight Linux DEs too. I have a crappy Compaq CQ56-115DX that I got from the NVIDIA chip settlement a couple years ago. It's got 2GB of RAM and what amounts to a single-core Athlon 64 3200+. Win7 obviously ran like garbage, but a SSD and Lubuntu made it very usable for basic productivity stuff. It was never fast, but it went from painful to usable.

The problem is that Ye Olde Linux Desktop isn't something you could hand to a random student and have them manage by themselves. Having a centralized management system is a very relevant feature there.

why not? my mom was using it. only reason i had to put her back on windows is because of shitty silverlight drm, doesn't even work in a vm.

oh, and she's non technical and over 60. people commonly mistake the concept of familiarity with usability. just like android isn't more unusable than ios. it's completely different and it has 3 buttons.

shitty silverlight drm, doesn't even work in a vm.

I've had good success with pipelight[0], including DRM'd sites (Netflix, etc). The biggest issue being user-agent sniffing (so I just set it as IE9 and leave it).

[0] - http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html

I setup something like that for my laptop a while back. I ended up switching to chrome, not chromium, as netflix supports HTML5 video streaming through it instead of silverlight.

That's good for Netflix + html5, but doesn't help with every site (ex: fox/cw/etc). So it probably isn't a good solution for 'Grandma' since she probably wouldn't have the knowledge to understand why it breaks on non-html5 video sites. Whereas pipelight + user-agent works (currently) for a larger number of sites.

What's the resolution like with Pipelight vs Chrome HTML5? It was my previous understanding that the bitrates and resolutions were limited running on any PC platform. http://www.technorms.com/42752/5-netflix-tips-hacks-you-shou... has info on how to select bitrates via the "hidden" menu.

I get full HD bitrates through pipelight (looking at the hidden menu in pipelight shows it at the highest bitrate). I'm not at my house right now, but I think it's generally in the 3500kbps range (or some number in the 3k range in whatever that menu shows). I don't know what the bitrate for Chrome HTML5 is since I don't use it.

Thanks, awesome to see that this is possible. I gave up on Netflix on Linux many moons ago and got the 4K-capable FireTV recently. Very happy with the ability to side load packages and install Kodi and Plex to talk with my FreeNAS, as well as having Prime video, Netflix, HBO Go, and YouTube work in official + supported modes with stuff like subtitles, surround sound, and 4K support (on Netflix). It's also an AirPlay target with a $1 app install, which also lets you "cast" YouTube videos or do iOS screen mirroring.

I couldn't build something better, especially considering that it's a fanless stylish small box with USB keyboard + mouse support. That it costs under $100 (got mine for $75 during Black Friday) is just a cherry on top. There's nothing I know of that has official support for more stuff while still allowing Plex + Kodi + side loading (for things like Firefox to watch Viki).

This is off-topic, but I just stumbled upon this Ask HN you've submitted 26 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10958687.

I am currently tinkering with betavoltaic cells as well. If you'd like to chat, my E-Mail address can be found in my profile.

They could do this for free by running Puppy Linux. I use it daily on my 10-year old laptop. It's Ubuntu-based and runs completely from RAM. My hard drive inside this laptop is dead but it takes about 18 seconds to boot from a USB2 flash drive.

I had the same thought on this, Puppy linux is great

Inspiring story...

This is an excellent example of a startup finding a niche, with the added bonus of providing a much-needed benefit to society...

Win/Win...kudos to Neverware!

Think I'll pull a couple of old Dell laptops out of my closet and rig them up to give away to a couple of kids I know...

This is all great in theory but real-world application is so painful and does not scale if it is anything more than a literal set it and forget it deployment. I currently work in K12 and have looked into CloudReady for the last 3-4 months. We abandoned it mainly because deployment was unbearable if imaging or running around with a dozen USB sticks. If you choose to go the managed device route you pay twice, once for the Neverware license which can be transferred to another laptop if the original dies and once for a Google console license which is non-transferable (for the type of license we typically purchase). We are currently working on rolling our own district specific Chromium deployment full with managed updates.

If you take away the money factor the sheer frustration of having to keep polishing turds and putting 6-8 year old hardware out there can be overwhelming whether it's as light as Chromium or still a bloated Windows image that takes 3 hours to deploy with all the hacky crap that has to happen to run outdated software. Keys come off, laptops get dropped, motherboards get fried from being on & closed in a laptop cart for 5 years and first-gen mSata SSD's fail. And then to do this with a staff of 6-10 people with varying skills for thousands and thousands of devices in some cases.

Better off biting the bullet and buying proper Chromebooks for ~$300 and be done with it. Windows is done in education as a standard. Lab environment, sure. Office 365 will fill the role for learning the "essential" Office suite. The kids are ready to move on. It's the adults making the curriculum and trying to teach it that can't get beyond what they already know.

It seems weird to me that Google isn't distributing ChromeOS as an installable OS. Isn't their goal to get everyone using Chrome, not to sell ChromeOS hardware?

From Linux you unpack the .bin file and dd it to a USB stick.

https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/213346247-Cr...

Might have a play on the old Thinkpad X60. Wish them well with the pricing model!

Well, that was easy.

Installed the 'home user' version on an X61s from March 2008 so an 8 year old laptop. Listening to an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum mp3 from local storage using the built in mp3 player (all sound buttons recognised). The X61s has an Atheros wifi card and Intel graphics so not too exotic in terms of drivers. 1.5Gb RAM and a 64Gb SSD and quite responsive except on 'noisy' Web sites where scrolling down the page will stutter now and again. I might be evil and switch one of the cores off in the BIOS and pull a RAM stick out and see how it goes.

You boot off the USB, you select language/keyboard and connect to wifi. Then the Adobe Flash installer appears. After that you can log in with your Google account and use the system as a live usb or choose to install to hard drive.

The latter option again asks for the language/keyboard stuff and then asks about single or dual boot. I went for single boot so erase whole drive, then you click next and you get a summary screen.Click 'next' and it is away - your existing data gone and a happy bar in the form of three 'bubbles'. It powers down when the install is finished. Rebooting you get the language/keyboard thing again and then sign into the Google account.

Claiming just under 4 hours on the old 6 cell battery. Fan calm. Top shows cpus bumbling along at around 5% or so playing this track with fairly 'calm' Web sites loaded. Font rendition is nice as might be expected.

I might set up another Google account for specifically testing this thing out on normal workloads. Might also try it on a Samsung NC10 netbook which has trickier kernel driver requirements (Samsung extensions).

I think that the company would benefit from mentioning the ability to run a live session off the USB stick without installing more prominently. They might get more eyeballs that way.

I installed Chromium OS on my mom's old notebook. It's actually nice, works very smoothly, practically everything out of the box and there are no bloated settings, applications etc. to confuse her, she doesn't need more than Gmail, Google and Google Hangouts anyway.

Interesting to see how Neverware has changed over the years. If I remember correctly their V2 product was about replacing old computers/laptops with virtual machines running in the cloud. They have a new solution but they're still solving the same problem.

then/than

The Verge needs English classes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com