Chromebooks May Get Apple Boot Camp-Like Windows 10 Dual Boot With 'Campfire' (xda-developers.com) 95
Google is reportedly working on a secret project to get Windows 10 running on Chromebooks. XDA Developers' Kieran Miyamoto reports on the latest developments surrounding "Campfire" -- the Chromebook equivalent of Apple's Boot Camp. From the report: Earlier this year, a mysterious project appeared on the Chromium Git. The Chrome OS developers had created a new firmware branch of the Google Pixelbook called eve-campfire and were working on a new "Alt OS mode" for this branch. We have since confirmed this Alt OS refers to Microsoft Windows 10 and found evidence that it wasn't just an internal project but intended for public release.
The developers have reworked the way in which they distribute updates to a rarely-used section of ROM on Chromebooks called RW_LEGACY. The RW_LEGACY section on a Chromebook's ROM traditionally gives users the ability to dual-boot into an alternative OS, but it is something of an afterthought during production and the section is rarely updated after a device leaves the factory. Now, with Campfire, Google will push signed updates to RW_LEGACY via the regular auto-update process, so firmware flashing won't be a concern for Joe Public. A recent commit for enabling Alt OS through crosh with a simple [alt_os enable] command indicates that it will be a fairly easy setup process from the user's end too. We may expect to see the first demo of "Campfire" at Google's upcoming Pixel 3 launch event in October. Also, the report notes that the Google Pixelbook won't be the only Chromebook with Campfire support, citing "mentions of multiple 'campfire variants.'"
The developers have reworked the way in which they distribute updates to a rarely-used section of ROM on Chromebooks called RW_LEGACY. The RW_LEGACY section on a Chromebook's ROM traditionally gives users the ability to dual-boot into an alternative OS, but it is something of an afterthought during production and the section is rarely updated after a device leaves the factory. Now, with Campfire, Google will push signed updates to RW_LEGACY via the regular auto-update process, so firmware flashing won't be a concern for Joe Public. A recent commit for enabling Alt OS through crosh with a simple [alt_os enable] command indicates that it will be a fairly easy setup process from the user's end too. We may expect to see the first demo of "Campfire" at Google's upcoming Pixel 3 launch event in October. Also, the report notes that the Google Pixelbook won't be the only Chromebook with Campfire support, citing "mentions of multiple 'campfire variants.'"
Re:Proving Windows is best (Score:5, Insightful)
you do not see much effort in reverse.
Not true, actually. [microsoft.com] Microsoft now officially supports and invests a lot of money in running Linux both under the Windows desktop and in the cloud. I would go so far as to speculate that Microsoft now has more money invested in this than the sum total of all the work that went into Wine.
But the elephant under the rug is, it's actually better to do it the other way: run Windows in a vm, that way you can keep your critical work and data entirely out of the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft knows this and now has a whole bunch of money invested in various efforts to forestall it. To be honest, it's hard to see that as a bad thing, it's the nearest thing to honest competition I have ever seen from that gang.
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How's that support for dual boot coming along?
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I just use vmplayer. I boot my Linux install from Windows, and I boot my Windows install from Linux. That way I have access to all of my applications regardless of which OS I'm running at the time. Well, almost all of them. I haven't got vmware graphics passthrough working at the same time I have the nVidia Linux binary driver installed. I haven't put any effort into that, though.
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I just use vmplayer.
I parted ways with Vmware when KVM (and others) started to get really good. Now, I much prefer KVM. I mean, really strongly prefer. Vmware had its day in the sun.
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Will KVM work with Intel CPUs that lack VT-d? I bought the 4770 instead of the 4790 because it was cheaper. I regret that choice as it doesn't support I/O pass thru. As a result I am limited to Windows 10/Hyper-V or Virtualbox unless I want to pluck $$$$ for VMWare workstation
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Will KVM work with Intel CPUs that lack VT-d?
You are out there beyond my personal experience. My impression is that it wil but the performance hit is too much for high end gaming.
I bought the 4770 instead of the 4790 because it was cheaper. I regret that choice as it doesn't support I/O pass thru. As a result I am limited to Windows 10/Hyper-V or Virtualbox unless I want to pluck $$$$ for VMWare workstation
Sorry Intel screwed you. Instead of dropping bucks on VMWare, why not change out the 4770 for a Ryzen? [userbenchmark.com] A motherboard swap is kind of hard core the first time but its a great skill to learn, and alternatively any decent screwdriver shop can do it in minutes.
Informative thread here. [reddit.com]
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I second this having upgraded from a i7 4770 to a Ryzen 7 1700. Virtualbox doesn't work well on them, but everything else I've tried has been great.
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My expensive 32 gigs of ram would have to be thrown out for DDR 4 in addition of a new motherboard. The IPC is about the same so there is no need to upgrade just for that.
I will wait for another few years until things improve. Maybe Ryzen2 with DDR 5 before I bother with the expense
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My expensive 32 gigs of ram would have to be thrown out for DDR 4 in addition of a new motherboard.
You could ebay it now while it's still worth something :) 32 GB of ddr4 can be had for $280 as of today. My crystal ball says there's a significant ddr4 price drop coming soon.
I don't disagree, waiting is a good option. I am eyeing a 16 core Zen 2 Threadripper build with 64 GB, hopefully it can be done for around $2000 some time in 1H/2019. Hardly a budget box, but great value and easy to justify by faster builds. But what to do with 64 lanes of PCI? Let's see, GPU is just 8, I'm not going to do dual or tri
Yes, qemu works. It predates VT-d. CPU overhead (Score:2)
> Will KVM work with Intel CPUs that lack VT-d?
"KVM" is often used to mean "qemu on top of KVM". Virt-manager actually calls qemu. Qemu internally uses KVM of it's available. Qemu runs fine without any CPU support for virtualization. I'd guesstimate maybe 10% slower than native if you use the right flags.
KVM itself uses VT-d, but that's not a big deal for light usage
There are a number of options you can use to optimize performance. For example, use -cpu host to set the right CPU type. If you don't, you
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I parted ways with Vmware when KVM (and others) started to get really good. Now, I much prefer KVM. I mean, really strongly prefer. Vmware had its day in the sun.
It's been a couple of years, but last time I checked 3d performance and compatibility with vmplayer was vastly ahead of KVM. Since gaming is the only reason I run Windows, it's still relevant to me.
Re:Proving Windows is best (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been a couple of years, but last time I checked 3d performance and compatibility with vmplayer was vastly ahead of KVM.
A couple of years ago was exactly when GPU passthrough was under heavy development. Now there are multiple reports of success and I just don't see horror stories. I have no doubt that VMware player was way ahead at the time, I have tremendous respect for their ability to make stuff work, but they also like to wrap it in layers of cruft that you can't avoid. That's a turnoff for me, compared to KVM, which is accessible at every level, including the one I prefer which is simply the command line. I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own disk images, thanks. VMDK is completely irrelevant to me.
Most folks use KVM via virt-manager or similar, I have no data on that. They seem happy, so I am happy for them. I'm happy for you too. :) The world is a better place with VMware in it. At the very least they keep the KVM devs on their toes.
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You do know VMPlayer is no longer free and is like $100. It and it's VMWare Workstation cousin is no longer being developed by Dell either. Sucks worse is VirtualBox is now owned by Oracle. Sigh
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You do know VMPlayer is no longer free and is like $100.
I didn't pay and I'm still using it. WP says it's still free to use player.
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How is that extinguish thing working out?
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But the elephant under the rug is, it's actually better to do it the other way: run Windows in a vm, that way you can keep your critical work and data entirely out of the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft knows this and now has a whole bunch of money invested in various efforts to forestall it. To be honest, it's hard to see that as a bad thing, it's the nearest thing to honest competition I have ever seen from that gang.
And now Chromebook users can share in the Microsoft BOHICA update experience. Microsoft is drooling over the prospect os BSOD'ing a Chromebook.
And I've booted Linux on Chromebooks just about since they came out.
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Surely it is a good idea for the campfire to come into the windows. Expect people to bend over backwards to accommodate the effort to reverse, Mac. Despite the haters.
Re: Proving Windows is best (Score:2)
Yeah Microsoft went bust because everyone's super cool like you.
Re: Proving Windows is best (Score:2)
Hooray for you. Not seeing the rest of the world following your amazingly cool example though.
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Never follow, Be a leader.
Run Windows under Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the new thing, run Windows under Linux. Linux GPU virtualization is even good enough now to run AAA games in a VM. For most of what you do... browsing, social networking, viewing media, the experience is better under Linux now than Windows (e.g., you will never get an upgrade nag while watching a movie.) Not to mention Microsoft won't be spying on most of what you do, except of course for what runs in the VM. You want that to be less every month.
Dual boot is out, sandboxing Windows is in.
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virtualization is even good enough now to run AAA games in a VM
I've got a one of those AA-powered dongles that plugs into a TV component jack; it contains almost 100 8-bit games... But I've never heard of such a device that runs on AAA; it must be really compact. Where did you get it?
At any rate, I'm not surprised that today's 64-bit PCs can easily handle emulating those games.
SameBoy emulates Game Boy Pocket (Score:2)
Game Boy Pocket runs on two AAA batteries, and mGBA and SameBoy emulate it.
(In addition to the battery meaning, "AAA" means leading-edge, large-budget production values.)
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I'm not surprised that today's 64-bit PCs can easily handle emulating those games.
Joke? Hard to tell. Anyway, GTA V on Arch Linux [reddit.com] But much more straightforward on a straight up gaming rig, or what the enthusiasts are doing these days, kickass Linux Ryzen workstations that also rock high end games. BTW, 4K Displayport monitors are now really cheap, it's a great time to be a nerd.
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Dual boot is out, sandboxing Windows is in.
I agree. I had setup my old Apple laptop to dual boot but then quickly realized that I'd need Windows for one thing and then MacOS for something else, usually at the same time. I could duplicate some functions on both so that I would not have to switch as often but then I'd have to find a way to keep those things synchronized. As soon as I was able to get a computer capable enough to run Windows in a VM and not have it compromise what I wanted to do in MacOS I never dual booted again. I just keep the Wi
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--You're doing it right. Why would you take a perfectly good Chromebook and sully it with a shite OS like Win10??
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I'm sure that's all true. But if your need for Windows is only occasional, and the app in question runs okay under WINE, that might be an even better solution. Firing up WINE takes seconds, not minutes like Windows. And, of course, it's free. Won't work for everything, but I assume most everything you run on MacOS is native. So WINE might just be all the Windows you need.
I use Wineskins to provide a single .app file with my custom win32 app and WINE bundled together and configured the way I want my use
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I'm actually really interested in giving this a go. I'm currently running Windows, with linux in virtualization, and it works very well.
But I'd love to turn it inside out. I'm not sure where to start. What linux virtualization solution would you recommend for hosting Win10 + games with gpu virtualization?
You say its 'good enough' to run AAA games. What sort of performance hit am I really facing? Do some games "just-not-work" What sort of stability loss am i looking at?
I've got an i7 and a gtx1080, if that'
Re:Run Windows under Linux (Score:5, Informative)
What linux virtualization solution would you recommend for hosting Win10 + games with gpu virtualization?
I haven't tried it myself yet, but there are multiple reports of success with Ryzen+KVM+GPU+W10, for example this one. [mathiashueber.com]
You say its 'good enough' to run AAA games. What sort of performance hit am I really facing?
My impression is, very little. GPU virtualization gives the guest OS direct access to PCI registers, the overhead can get very close to zero. This report from 2014 [isi.edu] shows overhead consistently less than 3%, often a lot less, and remarkably, sometimes actually faster in the VM. I'm not sure how that last one works.
The big overhead for VMs tends not to be CPU, but memory consumption, make sure you have enough to make both host and guest comfortable. You should be fine with 16 GB, but more memory is always better, I'm liking how it feels with 32 GB. You will want a separate SSD for Windows, I think, but that's not going to break the bank.
Do some games "just-not-work" What sort of stability loss am i looking at?
Again, I'm not doing it myself right now (I have too many unplayed games already without a bunch more from Windows) but I see multiple reports of success with GTA 5 and I don't see any horror stories. My feeling is, your system as a whole will be more stable than it is now, and the VM+Windows part of it will be exactly as stable as now.
I've got an i7 and a gtx1080, if that's a factor.
Though I am a newly-minted Ryzen fanboy, I love Intel too except for their business practices. VM stability seems exactly the same for Intel and AMD. That is very cool. Number of VM crashes I had over the years on Intel or AMD: exactly zero, and I really thrash those VMs.
What's the situation with multi-monitor support with something like this?
Dunno. I'm waiting for your report. The question you ought to ask is, what's the situation with sharing the GPU between host and guest? Lots of active discussion on it. [reddit.com] It's a thing, and multi-monitor passthrough is a thing.
And peripheral pass through? (usb headsets, usb controllers).
KVM has good USB passthrough, but for mouse and audio where performance is not an issue you probably want the virtual devices. There are a whole pile of online resources on it, e.g. here [wragg.org] and the community is active. Mostly people seem to be using libvirt and virt-manager. I don't, I just read the man page and run KVM/QEMU from the command line. Do that only if you enjoy that kind of thing.
There is a great and supportive community here. [reddit.com]
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Thanks for that. From some of the reading I've done since last night; yeah, 'sharing the GPU between host and guest' would be extremely desirable.
Straight passthru would be pretty unpleasant. With the guest and host using different monitors (or switching between mutliple inputs on the same monitor. To me that's not much functionally better than running two computers and a kvm switch. (although it is cheaper of course than 2 PCs.)
No, I'd definitely want the usual guest interface where I can run the guest in
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I'm actually really interested in giving this a go. I'm currently running Windows, with linux in virtualization, and it works very well.
But I'd love to turn it inside out. I'm not sure where to start. What linux virtualization solution would you recommend for hosting Win10 + games with gpu virtualization?
You say its 'good enough' to run AAA games. What sort of performance hit am I really facing? Do some games "just-not-work" What sort of stability loss am i looking at?
I've got an i7 and a gtx1080, if that's a factor.
What's the situation with multi-monitor support with something like this? And peripheral pass through? (usb headsets, usb controllers).
If you can point me at a current resource that covers the setup and configuration and pitfall; that would be terrific.
Before plunging to GPU passtrough, you should test your games with Wine and DXVK. I've been playing No Man's Sky and Fallout 4 with Wine+DXVK in 1440p for a quite a while now, on i7-6700 and GTX1080. Expect some graphic glitch here and there
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Before plunging to GPU passtrough, you should test your games with Wine and DXVK. I've been playing No Man's Sky and Fallout 4 with Wine+DXVK in 1440p for a quite a while now, on i7-6700 and GTX1080. Expect some graphic glitch here and there
Speaking of which, I installed Vulkan support on a Debian box a couple days ago and it came up without rebooting or even restarting X. How cool is that? Feeling lucky, I hunted down and installed the Unity Editor. [unity.com] Wow, it works great. Ran through all the tutorials in about 15 minutes, they are pathetic but you get some orientation. Basically, you learn to push the play button and you learn to drag and drop assets onto game objects.
Jumped straight into a demo project and was confused for hours, but eventuall
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Heres all the links i have bookmarked. Im sure you can make it work. The performance is basically bare metal. you have to pull some fuckery with the conf file for nvidia cards or you get error 53 i believe, because theyre cocksuckers that want to milk everybody. but thats a different issue. i hope these work for you.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/l... [pugetsystems.com]
https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08... [davidyat.es]
https://ubuntuforums.org/showt... [ubuntuforums.org]
https://lime-technology.com/fo... [lime-technology.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/... [reddit.com]
https://bufferoverflow.io/gpu [bufferoverflow.io]
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Last time I tried, even with pretty old games like IL-2, it sucked ass.
I'm considering changing from CentOS to MInt so this might be a good time to give it another go.
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Well at least their keyboards work.
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Hey, start your own right-wing tech site! Easy peasy! This is just Slashdot.
Meanwhile, The US is a bit of a mess, the Republicans own all branches of the Federal Gov't, and Microsoft is doing quite well.
So your whinging seems a tad disingenuous.
Here's a free clue - don't start a post with 'this post will certainly be censored'. It's just so weird and passive-aggressive, and makes any point you might have subsequently made seem a bit weak, or dodgy. Just say your piece without the off-putting preamble.
Your w
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Here's a free clue - don't start a post with 'this post will certainly be censored'. It's just so weird and passive-aggressive, and makes any point you might have subsequently made seem a bit weak, or dodgy.
But AC waasn't wrong. It got the downmodding it deserved.
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They already have soylent news, how many sites do two dozen angry neckbeards need? Especially when #gamergate gave way to #metoo, I'd think they'd all want to huddle together somewhere, "they tuk er jerbs!"
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The one that really went to hell fast was the Reddit-alike Voat. Soylent News I read via RSS, but don't really fe
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It seems to be actually quite balanced in terms of left/right wing stuff. If it was an actual case of deep SJW infection, posts would be just deleted and users would be banned left and right until this was resetdotera.
Of course, if you do shit like being pro actual nazism (as in extermination of jews, white ethnostate, all the package, not "things the far left disagre with") , you will get moderated down.
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Hah!
He was moderated right down to -1!
Perhaps he will learn to be a bit more subtle.
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Yep.
People just don't seem to like extremes here.
Seem several far left people getting the -1 treatment as well.
Or maybe the extremes also tend to moderate more and like a MAD, they just self destruct and the moderate people are all that is left.
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This post will certainly be censored to -1 for telling the truth that moderation is a form of censorship. Moderation suppresses and reduces the visibility of speech, which means that, by definition, moderation is censorship. That truth is highly unpopular here, but it's necessary to speak truth to power. Posts that express unpopular views like supporting the United States, the Republican Party, Microsoft, or law enforcement are quickly censored to -1.
The result is that Slashdot is now becoming an echo chamber and the real nerds are being driven away. That is why Slashdot comments are at their lowest rate in well over a decade and continue to decline. Moderation is a form of censorship, and it is killing Slashdot. If Slashdot is to survive, moderation must be abolished.
Of course you are modded to -1. Your reply is off topic, and it is about as stupid as a reply can be, and it is simply 100 percent wrong. Here's the issue sparky. I was browsing at -1 because I was moderating earlier today.
So I saw your pointless whiney wrong and stupid post. Here's the other thing Sparky. I am under no obligation to read your verbal vomit. You want to force me to? That isn't freedom of speech, its having to listen to a 3 year old screaming about being pissed off that he can't kiss his e
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Moderation - in other words changing scores doesn't impact on your free speech.
You have the freedom to say whatever you want, and you won't get arrested for it.
However, that doesn't stop the community from looking at what you are saying and thinking "this guy is a tool" and hiding your speech. Deleting a shitty thing you type isn't censorship, it's just the world saying "you can say whatever you want, but we don't like it, so cya"
Freedom of speech allows you to say anything you want, it doesn't mean it prev
what about android apps (Score:3)
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Apparently, there are claims that there are a number of Chromebooks that will run Android apps - I found this article: https://www.laptopmag.com/arti... [laptopmag.com] that lists the Chromebooks Android works on and how to enable it.
I have a number of Chromebooks (including some listed) and I haven't been able to get Google Play working. I'm expecting things to be better by the end of the year.
YMMV
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Thanx - I tried a couple of our Chromebooks today and found some that run Android apps.
You definitely require a touchscreen and accelerometer.
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I have a Samsung Chromebook Plus and it runs Android apps pretty well.
It's pretty well sandboxed though, so I don't know if it would be able to use the USB dongle you need for SDR.
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Yes, you can run Android apps on Chrome OS. The latest version adds better window support for Android apps too.
What were they thinking? (Score:2)
I was hoping my fellow computer scientists would have learned that just because we have the ability to do something doesn't mean that we should do it. HA! I'm just kidding, fuck it, let's put internet in some more shit! [youtu.be] ;)
Great, if I can run Linux instead (Score:3)
On at least one model of Chromebook you can load Libreboot and eliminate the risk of accidentally wiping out your Linux install. But it would be nice to be able to keep ChromeOS for those times when you want to interact with Google, and have a Linux install next to it which is completely free of them, and have it stay there like a good install should. I am not even slightly interested on running Windows 10 on the bare metal, like many other commenters in this discussion.
Campfire? Copy Apple much? (Score:1)
As much as they keep saying how much better than Apple they are, they still copy apple.
Gotta love it!
The official name will be Fuck Shit Stack (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
What a great idea (Score:3)
Re:What a great idea (Score:5, Informative)
I was the original alpha tester for Windows 10 on Bay Trail Chromebooks, and the first implementation was absolutely hideous. Windows To Go technically worked then, but it took minutes of disk thrashing to do anything because Bay Trail has some serious design flaws that slow down both USB and SD transfers enormously (though for different reasons). Once it got to the point where it would run natively from the eMMC, things got quite a bit more usable, but while it is possible to get Windows 10 up and running on a 16 GB eMMC, there isn't enough space for maintenance of any sort. This meant moving things out to a flash drive and symlinking all over. I actually had it working for a few months that way, but then of course a major feature update broke it. 32 GB would actually be adequate for the OS, and everything else can go onto a flash drive without symlinking.
Bay Trail (N28xx and N29xx Celerons) was shipped half-baked by Intel rather than miss deadlines. They couldn't get the SD card I/O to work reliably above 25 MB/s, so they just hacked it so it can't even try. Too many simultaneous calls to a USB drive can start blocking each other, dropping transfer speeds into the single digit kilobytes per second range. This wasn't particularly a Chromebook problem, it was all Bay Fail devices (except those that added chips to work around the problems).
Ultimately I sold it, and bought a Haswell Chromebook instead.
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Sure, more RAM and more storage would make the whole thing way better, but it is quite usable a
Remember NetBooks? (Score:3, Informative)
When they first came out they came with Linux and they were an absolute revelation. Small fast and perfect for mobile computing for people who weren't tied down to the Windows ecosystem. Then Microsoft leveraged their ability to charge whatever they wanted for Windows licenses to "encourage" vendors to dump Linux and ship a handicapped version of Windows instead. Once that handicapped version of Windows became standard, Microsoft started dictating hardware specifications and as a result we were stuck with shitty atom processors, tiny amounts of ram, and tiny hard drives for many more years than necessary going with the pace of technology. NetBooks went from being a great mobile PC option into just a shitty small laptop that you bought for your kid to wreck.
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Some of the more affordable Chromebooks run Windows quite well. I have an Acer C720 with a MrChromebox UEFI image, and the only thing that differs from a normal Windows ultrabook is the keyboard. Some key "chords" are required to compensate for keys not found on the Chromebook keyboard (Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, F11, F12, Insert, Delete, CapsLock, PrtSc, ScrollLock, Pause, "Windows key") but that is the only compromise required. If I had the touchscreen (C720P, and it can be added on after the fact, all C720 m
A day late, a dollar short. (Score:2)
Chromebooks have been able to run Windows for a few years now, thanks to the chrultrabook [reddit.com] crew. Google provided some assistance in the project, asking the developers to attend some of its internal conferences and lending them a Pixel 2 for a while (which turned out to have damaged audio hardware, making that a complete waste of time). Unfortunately, those same developers decided that newer Chromebooks are no longer worth supporting, due to undersized/underpowered non-replaceable components. (The good ones u
Why not duel boot into Android? (Score:2)
Remember? (Score:2)
I loved the days when you didn't need special permission to run any OS you wanted.
Nothing new here (Score:2)
You can install malware on just about anything.