A revisionist history of the best laptop at any price: the Cr-48 | Hacker News Reader

A revisionist history of the best laptop at any price: the Cr-48

wherein.posterous.com

27 pointsniels_olson16 comments

tl;dr: buy a Cr-48 on eBay for $225, put a bigger hard drive in for $120, follow Todd Vierling's recipe for Ubuntu with 3G, and have yourself an amazing laptop for $350.

OK, I like this article because I've been using my CR48 solely since I received it.

Firstly, it is not a dual core machine; the production Samsung/Acers are, the CR48 is single core, hyperthreaded.

I went a similar path with Ubuntu; although I just created a new stateful partition and access the ChromeOS Kernel. This allows me to dual boot when needed. After 8 months, I can tell you, it is not needed. I code and it is just not possible in ChromeOS with the current webapps available.

I have considered switching to full Ubuntu because ChromeOS chose to use a 32bit kernel for whatever reason(compatibility?). However, the processor can't support more than 2GB ram, even with a 64bit OS so I'm open to opinions.

I haven't used the 3G card yet, so I can't speak on it. I am considering swapping it out for a Broadcom HD Decoder so I can watch 720p and hopefully 1080p videos without choppiness.

Did you notice a performance increase when you swapped to a larger HD?

As for battery life, ChromeOS is a little better, but with Ubuntu, I routinely get 7 - 8.5 hours. There are some Ubuntu tweaks for SSD drives that I've done as well. Out of the box Ubuntu is setup for platter drives.

Overall the CR48 has some quirks but is an awesome machine, and I love the design of it more than the production models. I was able to buy an extra one of Craigslist for $150 as a backup. The closest competitor I think is the Macbook air 13" which costs 9x more(!)

> single core, hyperthreaded

thanks for the correction

> Did you notice a performance increase when you swapped to a larger HD?

No. Although the left palmrest tends to be a bit warmer!

> Ubuntu tweaks for SSD drives

Do tell? What?

> I love the design

This. I really like having an "unbranded" machine. I don't need big, glowing, ostentatious branding on my pants, why do I need it on my computer?

No prob, I'd like to get a hold of a production Chromebook to see the impact of an actual dual-core processor.

Here's a SSD tweaking link: http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubun...

The CR48 does raise some eyebrows when you pull it out;

This reminds me of how totally ADD Google was before Larry Page became CEO. It just started all sorts of shiny puppy projects, or even bought companies like Piknik to support those puppies [1]. Google today is a much more focussed animal. It is Google+ and social.

Given the Motorolla acquisition and the massive growth of mobile, I guess Android is still safe for now.

[1] http://cr-48.wikispaces.com/Video+Gallery

I had a pretty similar experience. Chrome on ChromeOS was unusably laggy. It would pause for 1 second every time I opened a new tab, and sometimes 2 full seconds before it would scroll. But after I flashed the ROM and installed stock Ubuntu on it, Firefox lagged much less. I eventually gave up on it because the wi-fi driver was buggy and would drop the signal every 5 minutes, but if I could fix that, I would be very happy with it as a web-browsing "appliance".

I would give it another go using Veirling's recipe. I use it as my primary laptop at this point.

I gave mine to someone who just started learning web programming and it has been great! Using shiftedit with dropbox for creating and editing files, and the battery life on it is amazing. But, i agree, ChromeOS is mot for everyone.

Interesting, and I would love to play around with a Cr-48 (maybe I'll get one off eBay), but I am so tired of people mis-using the term "brick".

Bricking a machine means it is permanently ruined. You cannot turn a brick back into a computer. Thus the term bricked it.

If you just need to reinstall the OS, that's not bricked. You just nuked it. It can be rebuilt.

corrected, thanks.

Any HNewsers still have one laying around they're not using and want to get rid of? I'd like to upgrade from my 3 year old netbook. Email is in profile.

Has anyone had luck installing Linux distributions other than Ubuntu? I'm thinking Arch Linux may be great for this.

Once you flash the BIOS, I suspect Brad's driver fix would work regardless.

Did the component tear-down price justify the Chromebook's low price, or was Google subsidizing them?

The Cr-48 discussed here was given out for free (sort of like a beta tester program), so that was by definition subsidized. ;)

And as far as I could tell, the "actual" Chromebooks that went on sale later one have been priced comparable to their non Chrome OS counterparts, so I don't think there were any subsidies in play.

I can agree that Ubuntu is vastly better than ChromeOS. Chrome in Ubuntu is far faster than Chrome in ChromeOS. That having been said, the rest of the environment is still too slow for my taste, even with a conservative window manager, and that's with me shelled into my server for compiles and the like.

Also, I've not fired it up since my free subscription expired, but the latest version of Ubuntu very happily sees and offers to enable the 3G card.

(final note, if this spurs anyone to google "install ubuntu on cr-48", I will advise you that opening the cr-48, taping the bios-write-protection to disable it, and installing (32-bit) Ubuntu from a jump drive is vastly easier than the other two options which require VirtualBox and/or replacing the user filesystem in place with scripts that haven't been updated for some time)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com