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ChromeOS Will No Longer Support Ext2/3/4 On External Drives/SD Cards

Posted by timothy on from the hope-this-is-reverted dept.

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.

11 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Are those Amazon sales legitimate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate? by Ksevio · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Are those Amazon sales legitimate? by Rob+Y. · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
  2. Re:Is there no commandline? by asimons04 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. One huge customer - schools by zerofoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:One huge customer - schools by Retron · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

    2. Re:One huge customer - schools by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > 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.

  4. There is a real problem by dalias · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Reconsidering by JustShootMe · · Score: 5, Informative

    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