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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 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.
tely agree
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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 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
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.
This is my biggest problem with the cloud as being implemented. I cant pop up my own cloud and point to that, i can only go to whatever strategic partner the device has a deal with. No Sony, i dont want to send my pictures to facebook or flickr from my camera, encrypt them and send them to my home network directly.....
Good-bye
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.
It's very reasonable to use Firefox, because it allows you to install the most essential privacy extensions.
Honestly, you can only browse the net nowadays with strong ad blockers, cache cleaners, automated cookie deletion and a whole bunch of web-tracker killer add-ons. Or, pay for a good VPN service.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.