Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com