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ChromeOS Will No Longer Support Ext2/3/4 On External Drives/SD Cards
An anonymous reader writes Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel and designed by Google to work with web applications and installed applications. Chromebook is one of the best selling laptops on Amazon. However, devs decided to drop support for ext2/3/4 on external drivers and SD card. It seems that ChromiumOS developers can't implement a script or feature to relabel EXT volumes in the left nav that is insertable and has RW privileges using Files.app. Given that this is the main filesystem in Linux, and is thereby automatically well supported by anything that leverages Linux, this choice makes absolutely no sense. Google may want to drop support for external storage and push the cloud storage on everyone. Overall Linux users and community members are not happy at all.
Whenever Chromebooks and ChromeOS comes up, somebody always points out those Amazon stats.
But are they actually legitimate sales?
By that, I'm asking if people actually bought these devices because they wanted to use them as Chromebooks running ChromeOS.
How many were technically-naive purchasers merely buying the cheapest laptops available, thinking they were typical Windows laptops, and not realizing that ChromeOS is actually so crippled?
How many were technically-savvy purchasers merely buying them so they could replace ChromeOS with a real Linux distro or some other OS?
Did anyone actually buy them intending to use ChromeOS?
This is so that they don't have to deal with the customer service complaints when a disk works in a chromebook but then doesn't on a PC .... wait, customer service? Nevermind.
If so, why can't members of the Linux community write the required code to support EXT2/3/4 properly, since Google's team can't?
Instead of bitching about losing the feature, zero in on the alleged problem, and provide a solution so it can be reinstated.
Problem solved.
Yes.
Another adage seems appropriate.
If a for profit company is taking care of you for free, you aren't the customer.. you're the product.
You should feel like a pig on a farm....well fed and happy right until the end.
Google's business model has always been about analyzing your data and selling "you" to others.
They need your data.
Each person needs to decide for themselves if what they're getting (free web email?) is worth what they're "selling" to google and others..
btw, I started using facebook's ads manager earlier this week for a project. If you haven't looked at it before, you should. The amount of data facebook thinks it knows about people and that it is willing to let advertisers target is pretty interesting.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Probably most of them. The drivers don't exist for Windows, and installing a Linux distro is a little more complicated than you might hope for. Plus, there are some actual benefits to ChomeOS, mostly that it will back up your files for you, and that it boots in seconds (maybe a total of ten seconds from clicking reboot to having all the browser windows open again), but it's also more secure than Linux. Security is achieved at the cost of making it hard to change the system.
Also keep in mind, these things ship with a 16GB SSD. You can install a couple Linux distributions in that space, but it's pretty cramped for any sort of content: you're not going to be gaming or torrenting very much. Increasing the storage is possible, but if you're going to buy a $200 laptop and a $100 SSD, you may as well buy a real laptop.
Generally speaking, it's a nice, cheap, internet appliance, for those who want a keyboard instead of a touchscreen. It's really not that bad of a user experience. I have been leaving mine around the house for the roommates; they browse the web, listen to music, watch movies, and type their resumes. I don't know what other features you think it needs.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Last time I tried, linux couldn't fsck or chkdsk the NTFS file system. Need to boot into Windows.
So, with this Chrome thing you can use an external hard drive, but if it's become corrupt you need a Windows laptop or desktop to fix the drive's content.
But maybe file system checks are deemed too confusing and are inaccessible from the GUI regardless of the file system, I don't know.
I work in a school's IT department and we won't be touching Chromebooks with a 50-foot bargepole. We use a mixture of desktops and laptops running Windows 7 and Office 2013 - which costs far less than it would commercially. We also use SCCM to manage the 1,000 or so PCs and laptops (generic i3s and Core2 Duos from the likes of Lenovo and HP) we have in the school.
Data is kept locally and is backed up in various ways (ranging from blu-ray to SANs), with the data stored in various parts of the site. Nothing gets stored on the pupils PCs other than temporary data when they're using the PC - their work is all accessed from our network servers.
Cloud access is something we work against for pupils, as it's an excellent way of them wasting time with Flash games etc - kids are very inventive when it comes to playing games (I know, I was exactly the same at school in the 90s!) and it's easier to curtail games on our system than it would be with Chromebooks.That's leaving aside the privacy situation, which doesn't fill me with joy: on a personal level I won't put anything of importance in the cloud, as I simply don't know who'll have access to it. Whereas data on my own network here is much easier to keep tabs on...
FAT32 has no permissions built in, which has caused huge usability issues in Android--and surely ChromeOS, too. Now they remove support for the common filesystems that *do* have permissions because of... a very minor usability issue?
There has to be more to it. And either way, I still can't imagine this being anywhere in the realm of reasonability if it worked at all. Practically the only people who used those filesystems on flash cards knew what they were doing and had very specific reasons for doing so.
From reading the linked proposal to drop ext2/3/4 support, there has been a lot of pushback from users, particularly developers and other power users. As far as I can gather, especially from comment #101, they are taking this feedback very seriously, and are looking into either making ext2/3/4 work with the feature that was supposedly the reason for dropping support, and/or finding an alternative way of supporting external drives with those file systems.
To me, this smells a lot like a couple of developers thinking they could pull a fast one and drop file systems they considered "unneeded", but now that feedback has been received, the overall feeling I get is "let's find a way to make this work". There may also have been a possible security risk with rogue disk images that needs to be handled.
Eat the rich.