Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment | Hacker News Reader

Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment

github.com

48 pointsjs212 comments

It would be nice if Google adopted crouton as a official dev environment and offered a way to backup a crouton environment to Google Drive - just settings and installed packages and user files, making it easy to sign into a chromebook and get started on a complete dev environment (after downloading some files).

Of course it defeats the purpose of chromebooks - simple cloud managed machines - but hey, why not?

I feel like there's a strong enough of a case use for it, especially since they built the Pixel specifically for the developer demographic. On the other hand, the demographic most interested in using it would also be able to do it themselves without Google lifting a finger.

Yeah it would be nice if they officially supported Linux on their Chromebooks for Android Studio if nothing else. With the Play Store coming to Chrome OS I hope it is only a matter of time before we see some kind of official developer setup. The Pixel would make a really nice machine IMHO.

I have an Acer C720 Chromebook on which I tinkered with crouton, before re-purposing the device as a YouTube player for my toddler. It was a cheap little novelty that I enjoyed playing with for awhile, but I just don't fully understand the impulse to turn these things into Linux development workstations.

You have to more or less root the device... press a Ctrl key combo during every boot in order to keep it rooted... and then open a shell and type a sequence of commands to enter a crouton Linux session.

Look, I have fond memories of using Slackwhare back in the 90's, and feeling like a wizard every time I figured out how to make my PC do something it wasn't "supposed to do". So I assume that hacker ethos is much of the appeal.

However, today Acer sells the Aspire One Cloudbook for the same price as the Acer Chromebook I bought two years ago. It's 14" instead of 11", has the same battery life, and is a full unlocked Windows PC (easily replaceable with Linux). So if you just want a cheap Linux PC with good battery life, why in the world wouldn't you go that route rather than buying a locked Chromebook and jumping through all the hoops? Using a Pixel would be even more bizarre, because at that point you're in the Macbook Pro price range.

Chromebooks are well-suited for school students, and non-technical business people at companies that revolve around Google Apps. You CAN squeeze those square pegs into round holes as a programmer, but it really doesn't make any practical sense to do so today.

Coming from the other side: I run Linux on a Chromebook Pixel 2015, but I don't use Crouton, I just replaced ChromeOS entirely. Except for "ctrl-L" on every boot (which, really, I don't reboot my machine enough for it to be anything but an extremely minor annoyance) it works perfectly. It's vastly higher-quality (i7 processor, 16GB RAM, fantastic screen, great battery life, fast-charging with USB-C, the build quality of a MBP) and more linux-compatible than anything else I could have purchased for a similar price ($1300).

The only real downside is the 64GB SSD, but I can augment that with an SD card. I'm pretty deeply in love with this laptop as a development machine.

I tried Crouton as a gamble, and it's paid off extremely well. It's the nicest linux laptop I've ever had, as the hardware support worked out of the box.

Being able to swap back and forth between Chrome OS and crouton at runtime has been great.

Difficulty resolving display settings for a cranky old projector under linux? No problem under Chrome OS.

Linux temporarily horked by an update, but I really need to check email? No problem.

I haven't needed to configure any linux wireless settings on the laptop either, as it operates through a crouton interface.

Want to let someone borrow your computer? Chrome OS is an instantly-understood interface.

Want to hit <delete> instead of <backspace>? Use the windows key as an unmapped personal <meta> key? Well, you can't have everything in life.

Battery life has been great, and the in-flight wireless deal that came with the Chromebook has pretty much offset the laptop's cost.

Thank you, Crouton devs. You've made my life better.

crouton has been around for years - any reason you're posting today?

What causes this phenomenon on HN? I find this happens a lot, where some longstanding project or old article or something gets posted and makes it to the front page without any context as to why it was posted. I'm left to hunt down what made this relevant or what is new on the page that made someone post this and made others upvote it, and often I can't figure it out at all. It's a bit weird.

Obviously it could happen for any number of reasons but my guess is that the most common reason is that someone encounters something for the first time and thinks "this is really cool" and wants to share it with someone, and then they think "I know, HN will love this!" and then they post it, and then they either get distracted and wander off, or they see everyone posting "why are you posting this, it's been around forever" type of stuff and they decide they have better stuff to do.

The way I think of it is by going back to how PG once described HN as YC's university campus. Like a college campus, people come through, some stay, some leave. Each new class has to learn some of the same lessons... hence some history, and some classes/topics, repeats with predictable periodicity.

Doesn't mean it doesn't bug the old hands to see the same thing come through again and again. :) And links to old discussions occasionally dig up useful old learning.

25 points means OP isn't the only one interested. I, like you, am not sure what caught so much attention though.

small reminder that GalliumOS (Real Linux for Chromebooks) has a new beta[0].

https://www.reddit.com/r/GalliumOS/comments/4l27qw/20beta1_i...

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