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.

Comments

Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

cheap, works, not too upset when 7 year old drops it, keeps him from attempting to use my good laptop, and avoids paying the windows tax.

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Ksevio]

I bought one to try it out with the knowledge end expectation that I could install Mint on it. I've switched it to developer mode (and back), but I haven't found any need for running actual applications on it. What I wanted was a very light laptop with a reasonable screen/keyboard (no netbooks), and it fits the bill perfectly (plus 6 second cold-boot time).

It does everything that a normal person could want - I use it for email, browsing the web, uploading pictures from a camera SD card, streaming music, editing powerpoint (through google presentations). It even has a built in SSH client for remoting into other machines via terminal as well as a remote desktop app.

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

It does everything that a normal person could want...

If they drop EXT2/3/4 it will cease doing everything a normal person could want. Hence the article.

Re: Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[orlanz]

I would assume so. These devices are 200 to 400 dollars each. That is still a lot of money. People would have returned them or at least posted very negative reviews if they got something unexpected. But it seems even with 1000 reviews these devices have very good 4 to 5 star ratings. So I would say they are valid purchases.

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[matbury]

Re: I'd rather pay Google than M$.

Why? What's the difference? Aren't they equally bad but in different ways?

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere, somehow those programmers must be paid.

Now it can either be by people buying the product, or it can be by moneytising your information for adverts.

Given that Apple, Microsoft, Google etc a re large contributors to open source they are not "gifting" their staff time, they see money in it.

So one way or another, you ARE paying for it.... call it a tax if you will,, but you ARE paying it.

Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate?

[Rob Y.]

Ummm, no. Just because you can point to examples and say 'both sides are bad', that doesn't make them equally bad. Fox is biased and MSNBC is biased, but only one promotes disinformation along with their bias - and refuses to correct their mistakes (if they're even accidental at all). And yet, you will see it reported, oh, everywhere, that MSNBC is the 'liberal' Fox, and they're both the same. They're not.

If you think Google's business model is 'evil', you obviously don't want a Chromebook - if only because you don't want to support Google. But Chrome and Chromebooks are basically just a way to prevent Microsoft from re-monopolizing the web browser market. Chromebooks work by doing what the web does best, shake things up. They don't provide Google with any other benefits that they can't get by promoting the Chrome browser on Windows, OS/X or Linux.

The original browser wars started because Microsoft felt threatened by the web - and definitely didn't want to see the emergence of cross-platform software development. Their business model was based on tying all end-user software to Windows. Microsoft would like nothing more than to translate their (continues) desktop dominance into mobile dominance. Sure, Google wants to continue their search dominance - but Chromebooks don't really add much to that effort. They just attempt to make sure that Microsoft isn't able to claw back the web and lock them out.

Open Source?

[BenJeremy]

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.

Sergey Brin needs a reminder

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:Sergey Brin needs a reminder

[bmajik]

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.

Re:Is there no commandline?

[Ksevio]

Yes and No. You can get a VERY basic terminal by typing ctrl-alt-T, but really all it can do is ssh to something else. If you change it into developer mode (takes a bit longer to boot), then you get access to root/full terminal.

I comple

[fisted]

tely agree

Re:Is there no commandline?

[asimons04]

I think the article hits it head-on about pushing users toward cloud storage, specifically Google Drive. I just got a Droid Maxx with KitKat and was shocked to find they had removed the ability to mount USB drives via USB OTG. Had to root my phone and install USB OTG Helper to have that basic functionality again. Obviously, the support is still there in the kernel; just the userspace access was removed, and USB OTG Helper was able to mount my flash drives successfully, even NTFS. Did I mention the Droid Maxx (made by Motorola after Google's acquisition) lacks an SD card? The 32 GB model was discontinued, so this is the 16 GB version and a Verizon exclusive, so you KNOW it's full of unremovable bloatware further depleting its limited, unexpandable storage. They tried to justify this by including 50 GB of Google Drive space for 2 years, but cloud storage should not be a replacement for local storage, only a supplement. Also, what if I did jump in feet-first and use all that extra space? What happens to my data 2 years from now? It's essentially being held hostage by the free "trial". Thankfully I only use cloud storage as off-site backup for important documents; I also store them in encrypted containers to prevent them from being data mined. Also, cloud storage is a pain when you have metered internet. I love me some Google products, but their "don't be evil" philosophy has gone out the window long ago.

Is the really that much of an issue?

[sirwired]

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?

Re:Is the really that much of an issue?

[nadaou]

Why bother developing, testing, and supporting a feature that few in their target market will ever use?

Because Google has a vested interest in the next generation of SD card not having patented and royalty incurring filesystem such as exFAT as the mandated standard. The more they can support TF card hardware spec instead of the SD card "experience" spec the better it will be for all of us. Except for Google's main competition in the laptop market that is.

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.

One huge customer - schools

[zerofoo]

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.

Re:One huge customer - schools

[mystikkman]

Yet you don't cringe at all the snooping that Google is doing with student the information.

http://mashable.com/2014/03/19...

>I know that kid's data is saved to their Google Drive - automatically.
Where it can be mined for showing ads.

Fantastic, indeed, but for Google, not for the students.

Re:One huge customer - schools

[0123456]

Yeah, the NSA will have a complete database of everything these kids did at school. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:One huge customer - schools

[Retron]

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...

Re:One huge customer - schools

[0123456]

My PC doesn't send everything I do to Google's servers, where the NSA can scoop it up.

And what planet are you living on, exactly, to have missed the news for the last few years? The tinfoil hat wearers were undestimating what the NSA has been doing... they weren't paranoid enough.

Re:One huge customer - schools

[Rob Y.]

That is simply not true. Google does not sell your private information. And yet the notion that they do is repeated ad infinitum. I wonder why. Google's business model is pretty straightforward. They use your information in order to sell ads that are more effective (and less annoying) than other sellers of ad space can do. It can get a little creepy around the edges, I suppose, to see what ads they think you'll click on - and if you're seriously uncomfortable about that, then you should stay away from their services. But they definitely do not sell your information to anyone. Apparently some people would like you to believe they do. Believe it if you want - but it's not true.

Re:One huge customer - schools

[Anonymous Coward]

> Google does not sell your private information. And yet the notion that they do is repeated ad infinitum.

You are absolutely correct.

> I wonder why.

Two reasons:
(1) Lots of people believe it because they don't fully understand Google's business
(2) Because it is short-hand for they could sell it in the future.

Google apologists will deny (2), but Google is a business. It is easy to for them to stick to their guns when it doesn't hurt them - just look at how much they used to support net neutrality and how much less vocal they are about it now. The point is that circumstances change. The day Google decides that selling access to the information it has collected would be more profitable is the day that their policies change and all your retroactively collected data now goes on sale.

Re:One huge customer - schools

[kiwi_james]

There's a number of aspects of what you said that are inaccurate, and I believe the approach you're taking is deficient in a number of areas.

Let me cover a few of these off:

1. Cloud access does not lead to wasting time with flash games.

Firstly, I think you are confusing cloud computing with Internet access. Leverage a cloud service (e.g. Google Apps or some SaaS based learning service) is completely different to unfettered internet access to play flash games. If your school chose to use Google Apps or Office 365 it doesn't all of a sudden mean a deluge of flash games.

2. Chromebooks can be managed with Chrome Management Console

With the Chrome Management Console you can control a vast array of policies - such as URLs that can be visited, what can be installed etc. All reasonably similar to the level of control you may have now on your windows machines. However, Chromebooks go beyond this as it is much harder for a student to bypass the controls that Chromebooks have as they is so locked down and have TPM for verified boot etc. So your statement that it's easier to "curtail games on your system" is probably false. For a brief summary, look here: https://www.google.com/chrome/... there's a whole lot more info on the detailed policies if you search for it.

3. The hidden cost and inefficient of managing your own onsite storage and backup.

You're almost spending more money than you need to managing your own infrastructure. Your cost of storage is certainly an order of magnitude higher than Google's due to their scale. You're doing backups - but it sounds like they're on site. Where's your geographic redundancy? Google will store your data across multiple geographically separate datacentres and manage all the infrastructure for you.

4. Your unjustified fear of losing control

You seem to still believe that Google is mining kid's information to serve them ads - yet Google Apps for education doesn't serve any ads. (http://www.google.com/edu/trust/)
You also seem to believe that using the cloud means you don't know who will access it. In fact Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. all make it pretty clear the controls they put in place regarding security and privacy - and back these up with SLAs etc. I'd have a lot more confidence in their security and privacy controls than in your own IT team. This is probably most contenious area, but you could start by talking to other schools who have made the shift to see how they overcame these kind of concerns.

I get that change is scary - and there's a lot of cloud FUD out there. But I'd really suggest you take the time to understand as it is fundamentally shifting how the vast majority of IT systems are delivered. I also think that keeping on doing things how you've always done them isn't a sustainable strategy in the long run.

Re: One huge customer - schools

[bickerdyke]

They COULD sell your data in the future, but they are unlikely to do so because what makes that data valuable is their exclusivity.

Actually selling them would make them worthless.

Yes, chromebooks are useful

[Tenebrousedge]

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.

same here. Installed Linux, run Chrome OS

[raymorris]

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.

How do you fsck NTFS?

[Blaskowicz]

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.

There is a real problem

[dalias]

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.

Reconsidering

[JustShootMe]

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.

Re:Is there no commandline?

[asimons04]

Metered/capped internet. Let us not forget about the scourge of metered internet. We can have ubiquitous cloud services and storage OR metered internet, NOT both.

Re:Yes, chromebooks are useful. But also annoying.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

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.

Re:Do what while sitting quietly after assignment?

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.