Chromebooks can now run Linux in a Chrome OS window | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks can now run Linux in a Chrome OS window

gigaom.com

25 pointsismavis8 comments

I honestly find living with the terminals in Chrome tabs and using a Chrome based text editor quite productive, leaving crouton very much in the background.

Unless you have a desperate need for a Linux desktop app (which can happen) then it's more a nice to have option than a day to day necessity. As such I don't recall ever having launched into a Linux desktop on my Chromebooks for any reason other than to check that I can.

Still, good, and if Chrome OS can get to self hosting: better.

I am excited by this because I do use crouton, to launch my normal E17 (E19) desktop, and while it works great, it does not work as fast as E17 using the native framebuffer.

And on my old Samsung Series 3 (XE303C12) the Mali GPU can only service one client at a time, so crouton will never be as fast as E17 would while not sharing cycles with Chrome.

The GPU drivers are distributed as blobs, as far as I can tell, and while they "only support" EGL/GLES and not OpenGL, they also only do so on the kernel version distributed by Google, which means that even if you perform the onerous machinations that I needed to boot with the kernel DRM and put the drivers from Mali in place where your software will find them, and manage to make all of this work with your distribution's version of X11 (or Wayland, I guess maybe?) you are still stuck running a 3.8.11 kernel, which is really ancient from about 10 minor versions ago.

It's a nice puzzle, but I am ready for someone to give me the answer. I have high hopes that with the "Crouton in a Chrome Window" there will be some kind of a pass-through mode that allows Enlightenment to grab what it needs from the existing screen and do its various compositing works in an accelerated mode. (The eternal optimist in me...)

Chromebooks can also run ChromeOS in a window on GNU/Linux* , which is rather more useful for ocassional Netflixing mixed with more productive use.

* probably a violation of the EULA

Don't you have to be in Developer mode (which Netflix refuses to run in, or at least used to) to run Linux?

That may have been the case in the past but last time I tried it, Netflix works fine in developer mode on my ARM chrome book from Samsung.

Absolutely backward.

I'd buy a Chromebook in a moment if I was convinced that dealing with getting around the bootloader and putting real Linux on the thing wouldn't be a pain in the ass.

I'll stick with >$200 eBay Thinkpads.

If you can set a chromebook to developer mode, it's quite simple to then sign your own images containing either another bootloader or a custom kernel. The only annoyance from my point of view is that vboot images don't seem to support an initrd.

I think this qualifies as a pain-in-the-ass, and this is the Google flagship device:

http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/chromebook_pixel_linux.txt

EDIT: The icing on the cake:

"Every time you boot up you'll need to do that Ctrl-L song and dance, since unfortunately you can't make SeaBIOS the default 30-sec timeout selection. Just deal with it."

Yuck.

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