How to make your own Chromebook | Hacker News Reader

How to make your own Chromebook

extremetech.com

28 pointsmrseb26 comments

I hate to be negative, especially given how coveted CR-48s are/were, but after about a week of getting mine I just had to put Ubuntu on it. Yeah, I spend 70% of my time in the browser, but I just can't give up that other 30% (dev stuff). It's not really worth having a laptop for me without a decent text editor/full ssh capabilities.

It might serve the masses well, but my point is if you're the type of person who would make your own you're probably better off not doing so.

What are your ssh complaints? I've been able to ssh into another computer and use vim and other cli tools without a problem, but I'm not an ssh power user by any stretch.

Are you able to do this without Jailbreaking?

> without a decent text editor/full ssh capabilities.

I routinely do dev work on my CR-48.

While it may not be your preferred editor, vim provides syntax highlighting, code folding, shell access and multitudes of other options which can be fine tuned to precisely the user's needs.

With the latest dev update I can specify which private key I want to use to connect to a given machine as well. They have turned on limited local filesystem access.

However, this is the dev channel; I have no clue what's going on in beta right now.

and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.

I think the low-ball hardware is very deliberate. If Google can prove this level of hardware can work just fine for it's purpose, it disrupts the market further. For $700+ you could definitely get better hardware than what is available on the iPad or iPad 2, but you certainly pay more for that device, don't you?

> and to top it off, you'll have a spare Windows 7 license that you can give to your mom

I'm pretty sure it won't work that way (legally). That license is very unlikely to be transferable for use on any machine other than the one it was bought with.

Yeah, even when you change motherboards your Win 7 stops working

That is very much false. I just installed a new motherboard, and I simply needed to re-activate.

Windows is much better at this than it used to be. XP used to have hassle if moving between single-CPU-single-core and anything else or vice-versa, or any change that altered ACPI support, but Vista/7 cope better with such changes. Getting XP to cope with a switch between SATA controllers is something of a black-art (or so I'm told, I've never needed to try) especially pre SP3. Moving between "specialist" controllers can still be "fun", but then again it would be for any OS.

Linux has traditionally been easier to cope with when a complete hardware change is seen by the OS, partly because most standard distros have kernels with every common controller type compiled as a loadable module, partly because it is easy to install the relevant modules before the change (if you have the relevant knowledge, of course) and because it is easier to make changes if it fails to boot post-change using a live CD of some sort - this greater resilience to core hardware changes is probably what the previous poster is alluding to, but for most (though still not quite as many) hardware configurations commonly seen on home machines and work desktops/laptops modern Windows variants survive the transition pretty well too.

Beats me, must be a Dell thing, only thing I can come up with.

I think the price difference may be accountable for in the specs. Most of today's netbooks come with spinning drives, and an SSD upgrade would cost $50-$100 more.

All things considered, I'm not sure whether an SSD is really necessary for an OS that runs Web apps. Nice, for sure, but...

I wonder if there's a significant difference between HDD and SSD boot and return-from-hibernate times.

Instant On really benefits from the fast sequential times and random cache hits from the low latency/high IOPS. I would imagine there is a lot of paging on a low memory machine.

The first generation macbook air users said that the SSD made up for the weak CPU in day to day use.

SSDs don't break if you drop the computer that they're in, throw it on a bed, or otherwise treat it badly. HDs do. Reducing the failure rate of Chromebooks is almost certainly worth it.

The Chromebook only has a 16Gb drive, so it'll be something similar to the little SSDs found in a number of netbooks two years ago. These suffer from very poor write performance (and not great bulk read performance) but are perfectly adequate for the sort of IO load a Chromebook will impart.

Maybe they are using better models (things will have moved on in the last two years) but they'll probably still be cheaper than a spinning-disk drive. Comparing a 160Gb spinning-disk to a high-spec 128Gb SSD would show a considerably price difference against the SSD, but these are smaller, slower, units. Two years ago the 8Gb SSD Acer netbook I bought was cheaper than the platter based drives (1200Gb IIRC), I expect the same to be the case here.

I dunno, spinning disk drives are ridiculously cheap these days. 160GB Laptop drives run ~$40 USD. The same price for SSDs will get you about 8GB of storage. It's just not comparable.

It might depend where the price breaks are. If you are buying one or two at retail then you are probably paying a large mark-up for the buzzword "SSD". Buzzword mark-up is not as significant if you in the market as an OEM buying in bulk.

Will they get the battery life? The boot time? If they can, I'd be interested in going this route.

It should be comparable. It's hard to say, without putting two machines side by side and seeing which one boots fastest/lasts the longest :)

If the hardware is the same, though, performance should be the same.

There's no such word as "should".

If there isn't, there should be.

They don't recommend a specific netbook to use for the installation (or I just missed it), but as far as battery life goes: the Acer Chromebook is rated at 6 hours, and the Samsung at 8.5 hours. My Eee PC 1005HA was rated at 10.5 hours, and after having it for a bit less than 1.5 years gets - in normal usage, not in theoretical manufacturer-rated usage - between 8 and 9 hours.

I haven't seen the figures for boot time for Chromebooks, so I can't really compare that. Since the Chromebooks don't have physical harddrives but instead a small SSD (as they don't need local storage for anything but the operating system, and that reducing the moving parts makes them less likely to fail), it might be difficult to get the same boot time.

But then you don't get the 100MB "free" 3G data plan from Verizon.

Best trying to do your Apple I

Any ironic comment receives an automatic downvote?

I can explain... I think that the Chromebook is a real shame, I remember in the dot com era people making specific appliances and many of them have more than a browser there.

The Google thinking is to me:

"if all you have is a browser, everything looks like html"

"if all you have html, everything looks like a browser" ?

Seems like punishment instead of logic.

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