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Here Come the Chromebooks, As Google and Intel Cozy-Up On Haswell

Posted by timothy on from the tradeoffs-and-favorites dept.

MojoKid writes "News from Intel (and Google) today includes an announcement that more Chromebooks are on their way to market packing Intel's Haswell processors. The new chips are designed to consume less power, thus preserving battery life for an all-day charge, while still offering better overall performance. Google notes that there are schools in over 20% of school districts across the country that now use Chromebooks, and with prices for some of the machines dipping as low as $199, deploying fleets of these machines in academia is an attractive option. What's interesting is the alignment between Intel and Google now, which should cause folks in Redmond to smart a bit, as yet another major competitor to the Windows operating system seems to clearly be coming into focus. Intel-Google partners including Acer, ASUS, HP, and Toshiba will be rolling out Chromebooks based on Haswell soon, and they'll collectively be sporting more variety of form factors."

3 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Crouton to the rescue by davide+marney · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've got an Acer Chromebook running Crouton and XFCE4. Best little devbox I ever had, especially for $199 bucks. It used to be that you had to give up verified boot (and the automatic patching that implies), but no longer.

    --
    "We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
  2. Re:Interesting by tlhIngan · · Score: 1, Informative

    As for me, I want a Chromebook Pixel, but wiped and running a full distro of Linux...the hardware is gorgeous.

    Could always just replace it with a full blown Linux distro. Problem solved.

    The pixel is one of the few Chromebooks you can install another OS with because it has a BIOS emulator. The other Chromebooks don't, so you can't install another Linux at all. ChromeOS uses coreboot I believe and as such, it's nice and secure.

    The problem with the Pixel is rebooting Linux is a pain as you have to be in developer mode, then hit Ctrl-L every time in order to load the BIOS, otherwise it'll try to boot ChromeOS in developer mode (which you probably wiped).

    Once installed, you'll find poor support for high-dpi displays (though it's changing, slowly - high-dpi support is coming to GNOME), and the touch screen works off the bat, but the touchpad probably won't...

    For hardware, it's gorgeous. But the damned thing really doesn't want to run anything other than ChromeOS - besides being inconvenient to use (rebooting or turning it on, you must hit Ctrl-L within 30 seconds or it'll stall out and you'll have to power cycle it to restart it).

    It's bad enough that there exists side-by-side chroot installs of Linux - which require entering developer mode and waiting 30 seconds until the bootloader times out and boots in developer mode.

    Very nice locked down machines, yes. Running an alternate OS though, isn't very fun at all.

    Of course, there's also the NSA factor - you're putting your data on Google's servers, after all...

    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/why-the-nsa-loves-googles-chromebook/

  3. Re:Interesting by realityimpaired · · Score: 5, Informative

    You'd be mistaken...

    http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.ca/2012/12/bodhi-armhf-alpha-for-samsung-chromebook.html

    There's a more recent build of that particular distro for it, but that's the instructions for how to do it. That's not a chroot, it's a native boot. You can, if you choose, nuke the chrome partition entirely and go fully native.