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Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but the proposed options are not acceptable.

No VPN? SSH as a plugin ???

Using a Chrome plugin for SSH is taking unnecessary risks. I see no reason why there couldn't be a terminal application on the Chromebook.

If it's due to UI, maybe there could be a way out of the GUI - IIRC the Chromebook runs on X-Windows.

If you can't hack it in a way where ctrl-alt-f1 will get you to a genuine linux getty, running standard GNU/Linux command line software after a recompile, I don't want a Chromebook for development.

Unless you have money constraints, it makes more sense to purchase a real laptop - a macbook if you need the battery time.

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  Using a Chrome plugin for SSH is taking unnecessary risks.

What kind of risks are you concerned about? It's a sandboxed NaCl plugin with a strict CSP that runs OpenSSH. I suppose you could get concerned about key security (since they're stored in an html5 filesystem), but you should really have a passphrase on those anyway.

  If you can't hack it in a way where ctrl-alt-f1 will get you to a genuine linux getty, running standard GNU/Linux...

Developer mode lets you do exactly this. Crouton just gives you a pleasant way of running a full Ubuntu install.

edit: I agree that vpn support is a huge disadvantage right now.

[it is just a theoretical concern. I do not give ssh passwords or keys to applications I am not comfortable with. Any browser plugin qualifies as such.]

I haven't one, and so far thought against purchasing one, yet if developer mode gives me a real console, I may give it a try. Is it sandboxed or restricted in any way (storage, network, etc), like for the privileges in android, that may prevent me from running an important daemon (say openvpn, creating or accessing tun/tap interfaces, doing tcpdump etc) ?

From http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo..., I understood that one had to reboot to get a command line.

I don't want to reboot everytime I need a terminal.

Is it possible to Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console while leaving the browser running? Could you please detail about your experiences in developper mode?

(ie can you leave X, or do you just get a xterm)

In http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11205504/chromebook-chome... it mentions Ctrl-Alt-t - but is that a xterminal or a text-mode getty?

I'm old school and prefer having gettys in inittab so that Ctrl-Alt-Fx gets me to the xth getty - and yes I know about tmux and screen.

  Is it possible to Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console while leaving the browser running?

Yup. With dev mode on, you can enable root access to VT2 (which is getty). VT1 is CrOS, so you can switch between the two as you please with Ctrl-Alt-F{1,2}.

There's an example of what VT2 looks like here: http://www.digifail.com/research/chrome.shtml.

  Is it sandboxed or restricted in any way [...]?

With dev mode on, you're root, so you can do whatever you want =)

Ctrl-Alt-t gets you crosh, which runs hterm in a browser tab.

Very interesting then.

In fact, I was so interested that before placing an order, I googled a bit to check its internals and make sure that the Chromebook Pixel could be upgraded.

Huh, soldered RAM, soldered SSD - ok whatever, what about the mini PCIe LTE card? Can I remove it and put something more useful in there? Nope - only USB is wired, so you can't put a mSata instead of the LTE card.

And I'm sorry, but that's a dealbreaker.

I would have got one if I could have put 16 Gb of RAM + a decent ssd, I might have purchased one with only 4 Gb - just like my current macbook air, as long as I could upgrade the SSD (like I did - on the macbook air!!), but with less storage that my current laptop and no possibility to fix that? No way.

I'll wait for a new version. If it provided ~0.5 Tb of SSD and 16 Gb of RAM, with the same hardware specs, I could spare with 2k USD - at least until the macbooks get touchscreens.

But trying to use the current model for the kind of development I do is just unreasonable. I need at least storage space, and I don't fancy the idea of travelling around with an external HD or praying for LTE connectivity.

They won't have that large of an SSD because Google would want you to use Chrome OS using cloud services as opposed to local hard drive space. I doubt they will go above the 16GB or whatever it is that they currently have.

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