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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.
I just can't see what the point of ChromeOS is.
I can sort of see why Firefox OS exists: it's just Mozilla thrashing around prior to death, trying to grasp onto anything that can keep them afloat. They know that when Google finally stops throwing money at them, or even just throws less, that they're going to fail as an organization. So they're trying to get a toehold in other markets, and Firefox OS, as shitty as it is, is the best they can manage.
But there's no such excuse for Google. They've got lots of money, lots of talent, and they even have a much better ChromeOS alternative: Android.
ChromeOS provides a miserable experience to begin with, and now they're apparently just making it even more useless.
So why even bother? Why waste more time, money and people on ChromeOS?
ChromeOS should be ended as a project. Firefox OS should be ended as a project. They're both money drains with no hope of ever producing something useful.
I have zero experience with Chrome OS. But if there is a commandline and if you can get root on that, you can mount whatever storage device the kernel sees and has the filesystem compiled into.
So while this might no be an example of how GUIs are limited compared to the commandline, it is an example how a GUI can be designed to artificially limit and control you. Of course, nobody should buy anything that is defective by design as this thing now seems to be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
By the way, what a horrendous summary.
Sergey Brin needs to remind himself what country he escaped as a child and stop helping American versions of the FSB from growing their powers. Of-course he hasn't been through a TSA experience himself and I am sure his and his family privacy are safe from Google's data mining operation, but he should not kid himself, he is on a special list of persons of interest, USA powers that be are certainly paying close attention to high profile targets like Brin and other influential and wealthy individuals. Does he really want to increase their powers? It would be a grave error on his part because private property rights are quite transient in the United Socialist States of Republicans (and Democrats).
Keeping all private information on line, where it can be data mined by Google and the NSA is profitable for Google but it also grows the power of the state and people should think really hard about letting the state have all that power.
You can't handle the truth.
it's to make it easier to migrate from Windows. just like MS allowed you to buy an upgrade version of MS Office in the 90's if you had a competing Office program
Back to mainframes we go.
tely agree
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I mean, seriously. I know a lot of people in the IT business and more than a few of them spend their life pretty much glued to a screen in some way or another. None of them ever took more than a cursory glance at ChromeOS. Is there anyone out there actually using this? And I mean for more than just "without it, my collection of Linux Distributions would not be complete".
Unfortunately, there are some school districts and colleges that are using these pieces of dung. So this is a non-trivial change. If our children are forced to put their lives in the cloud by this tech then they will becom e accustomed to it and desensitized to the effects doing that has on their privacy and security. It's a horrible, horrible idea to remove local storage capabilities from a computing device. No good will come from this action by Google and only shows how evil they are becoming. It would be one thing if this cloud stuff was really secure from anyone's eyes but the user/owner, but the reality is that once in the cloud your data is far more vulnerable to theft and exploitation than if stored on a local device. These schools are teaching these kids ridiculously bad habits all in the name of cost savings and convenience.
The target market for the units isn't uber-geeks, it's home users. Those home users will virtually always be inserting memory cards from their camera and attaching external drives they picked up at the local electronics store. As long as the boxes can talk to those, Google is fine.
Why bother developing, testing, and supporting a feature that few in their target market will ever use?
Buy a real laptop if you want to do whatever you want with it. If you buy (?) a locked-down device, which is controlled by a remote commercial entity and not by you, then don't act surprised when they don't support some use case of yours which doesn't help them make money.
They're apparently dropping support on a single SD card? (it should be "external drives and SD memory cards." Then this:
Which is an extremely awkward, if not utterly nonsensical, sentence.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
until the Systemd fiasco blows over.
Not going to happen.
If only there were sane and well-designed OS the developers of which actually think about the consequences of what they're doing.
Oh, wait. there are.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Google Apps, combined with Chromebooks is a very compelling platform for schools.
We are deploying tons of these. They are cheap to buy, easy to manage, and great for 90% of the work that students are asked to do. (We use Macs for the other 10%).
When a kid drops a $1000 Macbook, I cringe. I cringe at the cost, and at the loss of whatever data that kid saved to his/her desktop. When that same kid drops a $250 chromebook, the hardware loss isn't too terrible, and I know that kid's data is saved to their Google Drive - automatically.
These things are fantastic in schools.
It's a clear case.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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.
Google don't give a shit what you can afford, all they care about is how much you want it.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Same here. I had used Linix exclusively for fifteen years, so I installed a full-featured Linux distribution for dual boot. It's never been booted to the big Linux except that one day. ChromeOS does everything we've ever wanted to do on a small machine. Almost everything I do with my $2,500 big machine could be done within ChromeOS too, but for some things you want a 22 inch screen.
I'm not an editor by trade, but my father (sports copy editor) was during my childhood 60 years ago. The original phrase and your proposed rephrasing both suffer from ambiguity. Does it mean (external disk drives) and (external SD cards), or does it mean (external disk drives) and (all SD cards)? Technically, the clued-in reader will conclude that it means any removable storage device, but he doesn't know that from context. He arrives at that from his knowledge of technical issues.
The way to concisely remove the ambiguity is just to rephrase it "SD cards and external disk drives".
I bought an Acer Chromebook c720. Wiped ChromeOS and installed Bodhi Linux.
Nothing wrong with ChromeOS that Linix can't fix.
First, I've never owned a PC which decreased in functionality over time, like my CB. Advertised features are pulled without warning.
My MIL also has a great deal of difficulty with her CB. She can't tell what is an active control on the screen for her life.
I have an off the grid cabin. Given the CB's light weight, long battery life, I had hoped that my CB would be useful off grid, but it's turned out to be far less useful than promised. Without a good network connection, a CB is like talking to someone in a coma. Once I enabled dev mode and installed cruton, the device becomes alive again. I would never recommend anyone purchase a CB, unless they are a completely passive user and have access to other traditional compute resources or just want the hardware and will replace the OS.
Very true. But also, most people involved with linux development are not brainwashed sycophants of Red Hat Inc., Lennart Poettering, and systemd. The problem is with corporate interests fucking with the basic architecture of linux.
Google appears to be jumping on the rental business model. If you have to store stuff in the cloud, chances are you'll have to store stuff in their cloud (hey hey you you get off of my cloud). Eventually, you won't be able to move your data off of their cloud and once they get a captive audience, they'll start charging for it somehow.
Some might say that Google has now become "The Man" so stick it to The Man and buy a real computer.
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.
Ext 2/3/4 and any filesystem that records file ownership (especially numeric uids/gids) is not suitable for storage that's not associated with a particular system's user account database (/etc/passwd or otherwise). Linux could attempt to support such usage by virtualizing/remapping uids for "external" ext2/3/4-formatted drives, but it doesn't. Instead, you have a situation where file ownership is just silently wrong when you plug the drive into a different computer. So removing support is a big hammer, but I see how they could see it as a justifiable one when the status quo is broken like this.
rewrites the subject line just to grab attention.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
It's a cheap internet appliance with a keyboard as opposed to a touchscreen. Is anyone using tablets?
Or did you mean anyone using ChromeOS not on a Chromebook? Probably that animal doesn't exist, Google is trying to keep a "unified experience", i.e. Apple-like control over their platform. A large concern here is security; you can put it into "Developer Mode" and do whatever you want to the system, but otherwise it's pretty locked-down. I don't really mind this; people who want to screw with Linux can, and people who just want to browse the web and not worry about what the machine is doing can also do this. Turning on developer mode is extremely non-obvious, and that's probably good too.
As a primary machine, a Chromebook can be a little limiting, less so if you are well versed in wrangling Linux. However, I understand that it is being used in education a lot; it sounds pretty much perfect. Ultra-cheap hardware, simple software, low maintenance -- what's not to like?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
It is easy to be the "top selling laptop" when there's about a couple ChromeOS models, pitted against 60+ PC laptops or more that sometimes differ by one component or memory amount.
iPod was simarly the top MP3 player, or even "sold more than all others combined" but the cheapie no-brand ones had more sales by the many millions, only they were a great many different products and weren't even accounted for - it's probably impossible to know how many there are.
If you read one of the last comments, they appear to have listened and are considering reconsidering this decision.
Which marks the difference between a professional development shop such as Google, and Lennart Poettering.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
That's one FS I think the linux world could, at the moment, do without. It's got some cool features, but is not ready for primetime.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
If Google had scripted
chgmod 777
everytime a device were plugged in, I suppose people would be complaining about how everyone had access to their files.
That's true. I thought about digging into it, but given my schedule vs how much I care, I'll probably not spend the time on it.
ext2/3/4 has owners of files. It's a pain in the ass. eitehr you support it correctly (whihc is impossible if you dont manage the uid database for a single organization) or you make ugly patches which try to magically detect on which drives (removable) the os is supposed to drop uid infromation.
The first approach is useless, and i see big legal issues with the second approach (if somebody indeed would rely on protecting infromation by uid)
so better just stop it completely
I disagree with your "might as well buy a real laptop" statement. I see nothing wrong with buying a $200 Chromebook and attaching an external drive, whether a $100-$200 SSD or a $70 TB HD. My Chromebook has a usb 3 port. Very handy for attaching external HDs/SSDs. My chromebook is the higher model @ $250.
I agree Chromebooks are useful. One thing is certain. I will definitely be forking the Chrome OS on any future chromes I might buy, to add back in support for ext2/3/4. Or I may buy a second one which still has the support. If some update comes down removing the support, I will simply "patch" it, to add it back in.
The warranty on the first one expires in a few months. I may just install Linux over it, and be done with it. The Chrome OS, does have just enough quirks that annoy me enough to switch it to Linux. Everyone in the house knows how to use Linux, but there will likely be performance penalties in switching.
Perhaps the best solution is to use a fork of ChromeOS.
My wife loves hers, which she uses for web browsing, email, YouTube, etc. The instant boot in a small laptop form factor is nice.
I'm a long-time Linux developer, and as long as I have a terminal I'm good to go. I would probably choose a Chromebook over a tablet. As it is, my employer bought me a maxed out MacBook Pro, so that covers me for an instant- on device with keyboard and terminal. If I didn't have that I'd probably get a Chromebook like my wife's for every day use around the house like reading Slashdot.
It's not like they are removing local storage. The gui just won't automatically mount ext3-formatted SD cards. You can still use ntfs or vfat cards, along with the built-in storage.
I find starting a sentence in the subject and finishing it in the comment to be annoying. But so long as the comment subject summarizes the comment enough to help the user know whether or not to expand the comment, I don't see why that sort of attention is a bad thing.
I don't think they were prepared for the response they got.
I don't know which is the more disturbing point.
1) Coming to the conclusion of removing support of an internally used format for external devices. A format most, or all, of the developers of 3rd party apps use.
or
2) Not being able to foresee the kind of reaction from the developer community, which any successful OS these days need.
No one ever considers the /. effect.
But Google/Chromium coders should have!
Disturbing on many levels.
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.
If you answer this question, you will be in better shape to evaluate importance of ext4 support on flash cards. If it's for web browsing and flash card is just for uploading photos from a camera, I don't see any reason to care.
If you are a developer/power user, I don't see why you want Chrome OS. I would think a choice of web browsers and support for running local development IDEs would be a far bigger issue than ext4 external drives.
Or if you are a hobbyist and like to tinker, you can boot to chrubuntu or a modified version of chromium OS. So what exactly is the problem?
With doublespeak like "You agree to the use of your data in accordance with Googleâ(TM)s privacy policies" ChromeOS is so far removed from rational expectations of acceptable behavior it is foolish to attempt to pass judgment.
Caring about the format of external storage is like building a house out of cardboard, paper and duct tape then attempting to evaluate its compliance with building codes.
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.
From reading the linked code.chrome.org discussion (yes, all of it), it seems that this was one developer proposing to drop extFS support, ostensibly because of security issues and because the new volume renaming code they're working on doesn't work with extFS. A couple of developers agreed, but then a shitstorm of negative comments appeared. One of the final comments (from a different dev) says that a large number, if not most of the Chrome OS developers want to keep extFS and proposed either a workaround error message when trying to rename extFS volume, and/or implementing extFS in userspace for external drives, for security reasons.
Eat the rich.
Dropping NPAPI in Chrome was a great, if ballsy move. Flash/Java et al suck serious ass, and the sooner we can be rid of them, the better.
Regarding the extFS issue on Chrome OS, the summary here really tries to fan the (perhaps non-existent) flames. A couple of developers proposed dropping extFS support, but were soundly shut down by a deluge of comments that it was a stupid idea. From what I understand, they want to keep extFS and are looking at how to handle permissions, volume renaming and possible security issues.
Eat the rich.
Once a student has completed all of a teacher's assignments, what should the student be doing while sitting quietly between having completed the assignments and the bell other than games?
Perish the thought that they might--in a classroom, of all places--find a book to read.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Seems that comments on this issue have been shut down on their site... But I am certain that both the devs and management read slashdot... So keep the opinions coming! I am a Linux enthusiast (and one that switched to using it at work) that bought a chrome book for my brother's family. I was also looking for one for my own development -- using that as something light to interface to my Linux box... So, I am also very keen on keeping ChromeOS compatible with my boxen. Also, my son and daughter are taking android apps classes... Same thing. Please, Google, do no evil to me and my family?
Article said they plan to drop the support only for external devices. That means the kernel driver will still be there, and the OS partition itself will probably still be using ext.
Also any OS has to develop thinking on upgrades to their old user base, so the ext support will not just disappear. Very likely even if they switch the primary OS to something else like Btrfs, they will have to code, and include a ext3/4 to whatever becomes the default in their setup for old systems.
I searched 2 years ago for a means to mount ext4 filesystems with system assigned file ownership. I found many bug request asking for just such a feature, (and exactly for this reason, so the file system can be used on a device that is meant to be portable across different systems.)... but the devs handily found excuses to not do it. Maybe this will light a flame under the nether regions of the kernel devs in charge of the filesystem. EXT? is a great filesystem over all, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it for any system or permanent data drive, but what is really needed now, is a journaled filesystem that is designed with features for system protability.
I just can't see what the point of ChromeOS is.
[...]
But there's no such excuse for Google. They've got lots of money, lots of talent, and they even have a much better ChromeOS alternative: Android.
ChromeOS: A better Android.
Android has never really been productized by Google. ChromeOS has been; it's a finished product, unlike Android.
One of the major problems with Android is that companies shipping products based on it do not pre-announce. The upshot of that fact is that you end up with every Android version being a snapshot of the Android development tree, which carries the same version numbers/names as other Android products from other vendors, but which have incompatibilities. The one saving grace is that the devices are *mostly* running Dalvik, which is *mostly* binary compatible between the same major version of Android, when *mostly* the vendor partner didn't happen to stub its toes on a major library change for an important and commonly used library.
What drives this incompatibility is not only that the Android running hardware is not specified uniformly in terms of capability, screen resolution, input methods, and so on - ChromeBooks *are*, BTW, and so are Apple devices, for the most part - but the business model for the cell phone industry actively discourages manufacturers from pursuing upgraded versions of the OS on existing cell phone hardware. Because it doesn't sell more cell phone hardware, and it doesn't sell more cell phone contracts, and there's no real App ecosystem like there is in the Apple world.
So upgrades are a net negative to the manufacturers, like Samsung, who wants to sell widgets, and they're a net negative to AT&T and Verizon, etc., who want you to have a reason to want new hardware in order to get the new version of Android so that can catch you up in a new contract for the next 18 months until the next widget comes out. And while Google would like everyone to update the OS whenever Google releases a new version, the company rivalry between the licensees will keep their development from ever being open enough that Google will be able to control the productization to the point of being able to drive an App marketplace on the order of the iTunes App store, because they aren't building it themselves. So there's no money in it to drive Google's desires to reality.
So what's point of ChromeOS? It gives Google Apple-like control over the user experience on a platform where they control the update interval and frequency, and specify the hardware closely enough that, while it's not an iPad or an iPhone, it's a close enough analog.
And that's IMO why Android was moved under the same people who ran ChromeOS, rather than the other way around, and why the Android folks are reporting to Sundar Pichai, rather than his organization reporting to Andy Rubin.
I think the hope was that Android would be able to be productized by the only other organization within Google that's been able to successfully productize a hardware product (well, I guess now there's ChromeCast, but Rishi Chandra reports into Sundar's organization, too).
Personally, I don't think this is going to work out for Android, unless there's a delay built into the version releases for supported hardware, and then given the difficulty of carrier certification and getting the specific version on, and the carriers and the widget makers get on board with the idea, which is a lot of ducks to line up in a row. Plus the carrier and manufacturer buy-in would likely come at the cost of any potential profit off an App marketplace for the first few years, unless the plan was to allow third party marketplaces (which I think would be a mistake).
So ChromeOS is a model for what Google would have liked Android to be, but failed to achieve with it.
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Tired of partisan politics? Demand a split ticket - Green Party President with a Libertarian Vice-president.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Everything's a file in Unix, right? How about issuing the old ln -s /media/teresita/CHEAPASS_LEXAR_STICK nicename
I wouldn't want to run a large IDE on an 8-10 inch screen no matter what the OS was. Photoshop and Quartus are the types of things I had in mind when I said for some things you want a 22 inch screen.
Speaking of Photoshop, my wife CAN use ChromeOS to adjust the brightness and contrast of her photos before posting them to Facebook. It's a device for home use, not for work. Even at work, I have four large monitors at work. One monitor has my email, one has terminal sessions, often with vim, and one monitor has Chrome. Most of my time even at work is spent in email, a terminal/ vim, snd a web browser. The Chromebook can do those things. For heavy Photoshop, yes you want a desktop eith a large screen. For anything you'd pick up a handheld device for, the Chromebook is a hood choice.
9 times out of 10, a SD card is used in a phone or camera, or plugged into a Windows PC, all of which assume or expect the card to be formatted with vfat. So what if they don't allow ext on a SD card? Doesn't bother me.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
And it's not like they even wanted to drop extFS support completely, just the handling of it for external drives in their files.app file manager.
Eat the rich.
to change the label on an ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem, the command is e2label
Incidentally "Chromebox" is sold, with the intent of connecting it to a 22" monitor or bigger. It even support dual display and 4K monitors.
I'm sure it would be an interesting machine with 6GB to 10GB memory - imagine such a browser-only shitbox on an ultrawide 34" 3440x1440, and a worthwile pair of speakers, non-flat keyboard and reliable mouse.
Chromebook can be plugged into a 1080p monitor and (I presume) keyb/mouse too.
Speaking of Photoshop, my wife CAN use ChromeOS to adjust the brightness and contrast of her photos before posting them to Facebook
But Paint Shop Pro on Windows 3.1 had more features than that.
From what I have seen in the change sets, it appears most of the code changes were done after the early 90s, a vast majority appears after 2000 even, especially where ext3 and ext4 are concerned.
I'd say you didn't check the source and that's why you come up with stories like "code written in the early 90's".
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why use on removable media a filesystem that is not universal?
Use UDF instead!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"As it stands now every smartphone with an SD card has as part of its manufacturing cost about $2 going straight to Microsoft for the privilege of using exFAT, because the SD standards committee in their wisdom decided that SD cards can't be called SD cards without it."
Independent of what the SD card lists as a spec before you can call something an SD reader, an SD reader without exFAT won't read the vast majority of cards out there. That's ok if you just want to use it as an internal-flash extender, but not so good if you ever want to remove the thing and slot in something else.
If you have a text editor, you can write anything. Most operating systems are written with simple text editors. As you made reference to, Windows was written by rearranging fortune cookies, but the others were written with text editors.
> But Paint Shop Pro on Windows 3.1 had more features than that.
And? She can do what she wants to do. Chromebook has other features too, which she doesn't use. What matters is that it can do what she wants it to do. Things she's not interested in doing don't matter, except that bloat is generally a bad thing.
X forwarding is supposed to work via -Y. If you tried with -X, you might try again with -Y.
How quaint.
Of course, that assumes the instructors are actually teaching, which might be an erroneous assumption on my part.
Teaching doesn't necessarily mean filling the entire state-mandated hour with a lecture. Some schools have started to offer an option for "flipped" classes to students with home Internet, which let students watch the lecture on demand at home. This frees teachers to give more individual attention to students during class time.
So, do you typically develop your apps directly on an iPad, Android Phone or Playstation, or do you have a nice developer laptop for coding and devices for testing?
Most of my job could be done through ChromeOS as well. I do web and mobile application monitoring and reporting, presentations for the business people, approve changes to systems, verify that systems are up and fully functional after incidents are solved, propose improvements and upgrades, and sometimes a bit of scripting etc.
For the business side of things, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations can all be handled through Google Docs or Office365. Almost all of the specialty tools I use are either SaaS or hosted by ourselves and accessed through a web interface. We have a few legacy desktop applications and a couple of Java-dependent applications that I wouldn't be able to use directly, but a handful of remote desktop machines could take of those needs for the entire company.
Our IT costs could be reduced by a huge amount if we could have everything as a SaaS or locally hosted web-based tool, and replace everyone's laptops and desktops with something like Chromebooks or Chromeboxes. All with a standard image that could be reflashed in minutes if needed, while all their data stayed backed-up in a central location (on our own servers, of course). If ChromeOS had Java support, I could migrate today.
Eat the rich.
Get a grip, sonny. A question was asked. I gave an answer. If you'd like to supply a different one, feel free. But don't you try and yank my chain just because I expressed an opinion. If I touched a nerve because you're a fuckoff in school and know it, that's your problem, not mine.
BTW, when I was in school, "free time" did not begin *until* the bell rang, not before.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No, people didn't buy them "because they wanted to use them as Chromebooks"
People buy computers in order to do things with them. For example, my wife got hers to replace a Windows XP netbook.
The logic: "It does everything I need it to do and is about half the weight of the old Asus netbook".
People don't buy a computer in order to use this or that OS - they buy it to do things with.
They're scared off of using one OS or another by people telling them that it'll be too difficult to learn.
(which is utter BS!!)
Mike
There are no ads in either the Google Apps for Education service or the Nonprofit service.
From the Google Apps for Education - Common Questions:
"For all EDU domains ads are turned off in Google Apps for Education services and K-12 Google Apps for Education users will not see ads when they use Google Search signed in to their Apps for Education accounts."
As far as "student records privacy" goes, there is tons of case law siding with schools and email providers - there is no expectation of privacy when you are using someone else's email system:
Reichert v. Elizabethtown College, 2011 WL 3438318 (E.D.Pa. August 5, 2011)
http://blog.internetcases.com/...
We provide computer networks for school work related use. Any other use is unacceptable as defined in our acceptable use policy. If students want privacy, they should use their own systems on their own time.
Your main concerns seem to be:
1. Cost
2. Management
3. Data location/security
4."Cloud"/internet access?
1 and 2. Google's chromebook/apps platform is completely free. You buy a chromebook (about $250) and a management license ($30) - and that's it. Your Microsoft products and their supporting management/backup software cost way more than that - I know - I bought them for years.
3. Backing up your data - google backs up your data to data centers all over the world and snapshots your data so you can go back in time - again for free. I've bought EMC and Dell SANs - even the cheap ones are very expensive.
4. Cloud/internet access. We have existing filtering systems in place, and our chromebooks work with those systems just like our old machines did. Google also goes one step further by giving you the tools in their management console to build web access policies. You can make web access as tight or as loose as you like. The really great thing is that these policies are applied directly to the machine. If a student takes a chromebook home, those policies are still enforced. This means that web filtering is no longer tied to your physical network located at the school.
The bottom line is that this is where computing is going. Just like it is usually not efficient to generate your own power and water, it will soon not be efficient to generate every IT system you use in house. Sure, lots of people will fight that trend, but efficiency always wins. It's going to be very hard to justify hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions) poured into your datacenters, when competing schools are doing similar things for free (or near free).
Just applied the latest beta channel update, my ext4 SD Card and USB Flash drive filesystems are being mounted automatically and visible on the "Files" app.