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After Negative User Response, ChromeOS To Re-Introduce Support For Ext{2,3,4}
NotInHere writes: Only three days after the public learned that the ChromeOS project was going to disable ext2fs support for external drives (causing Linux users to voice many protests on websites like Slashdot and the issue tracker), the ChromeOS team now plans to support it again. To quote Ben Goodger's comment: "Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We've heard you loud and clear. We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we're working to get it into the next stable channel release."
Next up, after negative user response, ChromeOS to publish full source code and become free user-respecting software.
Correct response. Thanks Google for listening. I definitely would consider a Chromebox however ext support is manditory!
So now bitching and moaning constitutes contributing to F/OSS? Awesome! I'm an open source contributor! Now to put this on my resume.....
Really, why focus on ChromeOS at all when Android does everything it does and a lot more besides. They should focus on Android.
[sad to say Sundar, head of ChromeOS, took over Android from Andy Rubin, which is why the development of Android seems to be more about running Android apps on ChromeOS, to rescue ChromeOS than anything to benefit Android].
It's sad, they have a desktop OS there in Android, yet Samsung are the ones using the windows and dialogs that Android supports but doesn't use, in their Note series, and Google's Android development is just cosmetic.
Samsung is really leading Android at this point, Lollipop is just a reskin and a few tweaks.
Microsoft and RedHat: watch and learn from Google
Now where can I bitch and moan about Chrome loading all tabs at once on startup? Such a pain to launch it and wait for a.couple dozen js- and flash-ridden pages to load..
So a bug is a feature and per Google, a removed feature is a bug? Okay, I think I have it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Now if they would just support LUKS I would be a happy camper.
At least they are listening. But, it would be nice if they pushed a unified OS between the Chrome stuff and Android. Annoying when a phone/tablet has more software available than a "laptop".
A responsive development team. That's pretty cool! Now if only Google would put some time into improving Gmail because their web based product sucks ass.
Android has full support for a windowing system, that is exactly what Samsung is using when it does the Note line. You might think its splitting the screen with some hack, but actually its just using the windows that are supported, but normally full screen.
Android also supports a mouse, touchpad, and keyboard. It is more than touch interface.
Samsung Note is the biggest selling tablet, and uses these features (ok, the mouse is substituted for the hover stylus, but the principle is the same). So the system *DOES* sell, and in volumes far bigger than Windows laptops are selling right now. But this is Samsungs not Googles Android that sells here. It Samsung that are using the stylus as a mouse, and using the windowing systems to put multiple apps on screen.
Chrome OS is not selling, and the ability to run *some* Android apps on ChromeOS will not fix that. It is not in any sense a full OS.
Then Google would have completely ignored the complaints claiming that their research showed absolutely everyone just loved elimination of support for external drives.
We talked, they listened.
Sitting here at breakfast, happily using my little Chromebook that boots into Linux when I need it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Unfortunately not every time they respond to feedback like that. There has been a longlasting circus of people wanting to Google to reintroduce "tree style tab" functionality in Chrome, a feature that was available for a while as an experimental thing. Currently the discussion is around Chrome bug #344870. I would appreciate if some engineer had at least the balls to say "no, we are not implementing that". Of course, maybe even Google itself hasn't made the final decision on the matter, and they are kind of avoiding the issue for now.
Other android smartphones flash drives with OTG cables out of the box, why don't you?
I'm a linux user, and a ChromeOS user. I failed to see why everyone got their painties in such a bunch over this. ext* external file systems don't really seem to be in the scope of the ChormeOS devices, what would be the use case for 99.99% of users of ChromeOS to do this? Heck, I don't even format my detachable external drives as ext* on my linux boxen as those are the drives I use to transfer bits around to other computers.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
> ChromeOS tends to ship on Tivoized hardware
Quite the opposite. At least Acer, Dell, Samsung, HP and Lenovo Chromebooks all support developer mode, where you have full root access and can even boot any other Linux from a USB stick or SD card. Is there another manufacturer that makes a Chromebook, and locks it?
To quote Ben Goodger's comment: "Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We've heard you loud and clear. We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we're working to get it into the next stable channel release."
It's not a bug unless it was an accident.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The minute Google touches Gmail again to do any improvements, they're going to change the interface to their new cardifided bullshit, just like Google+ and Drive. I don't want them gimping the Gmail interface on the web with unremovable whitespace and hidden details.
Which is exactly what happens with Android (see: microSD support debate). I'm glad the Chromebook community is nascent enough to avoid the sheeple.
Even if you don't, others do. I read plenty of comments on the link in TFA where people explained their setups. Many users are using ext for its featureset, and don't need compatibility with Windows systems.
This is true with one big caveat: the kernel still comes from the cromeOS partition, not the linux partition. I learned this the hard way with my chromebook....I could never get it to a 2.6 Kernel (never mind 3.x) because the system had actually booted the kernel from the chromeOS partition, but the rest of linux from my ubuntu partition.
yep. Just bought an Acer c720-3404 (i3/4GB model) and a 128GB SSD for it.
They're pushing cloud storage too hard IMNHO, and I took a look at their storage costs last night to find out how much that 100GB or whatever that gave me for would costs only to find that after 6m I could've bought a 2TB drive(desktop) or probably c. 1TB notebook hdd or c. 256GB SSD...
The c720 isn't that bad. Played stock Amazon instant vid/netflix then dev moded it. Didn't get around to croutoning it on an SD although I did go so far as prepping the sd, but since the ssd was supposed to be arriving soon decided to just skip it and swap in the ssd then crouton it.
The screen isn't nearly as bad as some of the reviews make it sound, nor is the keyboard, I just wish that they'd make a tinier one more in line with the old librettos and/or an i5 11.6".
Batt runtime seems to be close to what they advertise for me so far, c. 8h which along w/size and the ability to run linux either chrooted, internally(BIOS flash), or externally(USB or SD) to make it more useful. Chromeos isn't as bad as I was expecting, but I'm still just NOT a Chrome fan. Dev mode reportedly breaks netflix playback(not sure if it's fixable), but TBH I RARELY watch vid when not at home, and then just stream it through my roku 3 to TV or through desktop. (I haven't investigated it, but I have a suspicion that workarounds are available to allow netflix to play in devmode...)
It "boots" very fast, but dev mode throws in a monkey wrench as they have a pause screen that stays up for 30s, unless you ctrl-d by it, and if you hit spacebar accidentally(or some other fool does it on purpose) you get to go back to square one(like an android factory reset). ...now just to find the time to tear apart my new toy(voiding the warranty) and installing a useful sized ssd.
One thing that I will say, screen aside I just couldn't see paying what $1300? for the pixel. My Sager 7330 cost less(i7 4800MQ/16GB/765m/1920x1080 13.3"). 1920x1080 isn't quite as high res as the pixel, but at 13.3" it's my favorite screen on a notebook so far, bright, good color rep, etc. Better than my desktop display.
The C720 is somewhat less than that, but what do you expect for c. $360? or $200 if you go for the celery.
One thing I will say don't bother trying chrome://imageburner as it didn't work for me as in looks like it starts to work then does nothing, no error messages, nothing. Had to use their "standalone" recovery app to create a clean recovery image(need that for ssd install).
Where did you hear this? I have a stock 3.16 kernel running on my Acer C720 Chromebook, plus all the hardware is fully supported by Linux
This Sig does not Exist.
Here are 2.6 and 3.4 kernels with Chromebook drivers:
http://www.chromebook-linux.co...
You don't have to use a kernel built for Chromebook, but it makes sense to in order to ensure you have the drivers you need, without a bunch of other drivers for raid cards and stuff that you don't have.
It occurred to me you might have run a chrooted environment, where you're running both ChromeOS AND the other Linux distribution simultaneously.
Yeah, a CPU can only run one kernel at a time without virtualization, so if you want to run two operating systems at once they'll share a kernel.
All I know is, whoever this satorux@chormium.org is, he's the biggest dumbass on the ChromeOS team and should be asked to leave (or dropped). He clearly has no concept of who uses ChromeOS and should not be making decisions as to what features it has. He started the whole thread and kept defending the decision even when it was clear that it was going to hurt their development community.
"OtherOS would be OtherOS all over again"
No!?!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I guess. But WTF were you people thinking? That course of action was a not only a colossal blunder, it was an obviously colossal blunder. What twisted reasoning could possibly have made that seem like a good idea.?
Developer mode is often a pain to invoke. Oftentimes there's no way to boot developer mode by default -- you have to press a key combination to override the default, and you have to do it every single time you boot into developer mode. On the Chromebook Pixel it imposes a 30-second delay on you every time you boot into developer mode without pressing the key combination.
OS is not selling...
Wake up! Laptops running ChromeOS have been topping best seller lists for years now.
Maybe they could fix that while they are at it so I don't have to root my devices anymore?
Ext2/3/4 are very stable filesystems, and widely supported by the GNU/Linux community, why in the world they would not support them is anybody's guess. Thankfully they have reversed course and will continue its support.
If you have one of the models with a rotating disk rather than an SSD, the C720 is nearly identical to Windows systems that Acer sells. (Only the bootloader and the Google keyboard are different.) Even the SSD is bog-standard hardware, though Acer doesn't offer a Windows version of that particular platform with it. So it's not surprising that there would be no driver issues. The other Intel-based Chromebooks don't have exact Windows counterparts but also are unlikely to have driver issues.
ARM-based Chromebooks are another story. Since there are no ARM systems for full Windows, hardware support for that platform is more limited. Though I know that boot of a full Linux distribution has been done on the cheap Samsung ARM Chromebook, so it's not impossible.
The C710 had a terrible keyboard. The C720 is an improvement; not perfect but not awful either. Both have decent but not earthshaking TN screens. If you want a Chromebook with a good screen you want one of the HP models with an IPS display.
The Pixel was a statement product. I don't think Google had any expectation of selling a significant number of them. I doubt that the number sold matches the number that were issued to employees or given away at Google I/O.
For mobile usage, it skews even further towards the browser.
For me it skews the opposite way. My laptop is offline while I ride the city bus to and from work because otherwise, I'd have to pay another $400 a year recurring bill. So I surf while on Wi-Fi and code while offline.
Android has full support for a windowing system
True, but if you actually implement it, you are legally prohibited from shipping Google Play Store on any device you make or sell. The Android Compatibility Definition Document, published by Google, states that the window size presented to an application shall never change after installation on a device. This effectively implies that the windowing system shall implement an "all maximized all the time" policy. And if your device doesn't conform to the CDD, Google won't license Gapps to you.
it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage
Which carries a substantial recurring fee. I already pay for Internet at home. Why should I have to pay again to be able to use my own computer while riding the city bus?
Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing?
Because as implemented, it restricts me from choosing with whom to centralize computing power.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform?
Because a country's competition regulator may decide that Google has market power over operating systems that ship on laptop computers with 10" displays and thus require them to do so.
But for big data crunching tasks, compiling and the like, why should that [not] be centralized?
I see two reasons. For one thing, I've have to pay a cellular ISP beaucoup bucks to move the bits between my laptop on the bus and the service-as-a-software-substitute provider. For another, I don't necessarily want the service-as-a-software-substitute provider to be able to data-mine what I'm compiling. Finally, for a lot of projects I work on, it takes ten seconds or less to rebuild a project from make clean even on a 4-year-old laptop with a dinky little 1-core 2-thread Atom N450 CPU, and rebuilding with only a few changed files is even faster. It'd take at least that long to push the source over 3G to a SaaSS provider, wait for build, and pull down the binary, and that's if the SaaSS provider supports all the custom data conversion steps that my build process uses.
On the other hand, if you're just keeping a bunch of pages open every single session because you'll want to go back to them at some point, why not just save them as bookmarks instead?
Say I have a bunch of pages that I've opened in tabs, and then the browser crashes. When I restart the browser, I want the pages to reload completely so that I can keep reading them even after I lose Internet access. This usually happens when I put my laptop to sleep, board the city bus for work, and wake my laptop.
After all, there's a basic text editor ;-)
So I've written code. Now I need to test it. Does Chrome Web Store have compilers and environments in which to run compiled code? Or would I essentially be stuck writing JavaScript for a web page and later hand-translating that to the language used by the target platform?
Mobile data plans are cheap as chips in most first-world countries
By "most first-world countries", do you include the United States or somewhere else where most able-bodied people born in the United States can easily qualify for a work visa? If so, to which countries are you referring?
plus odds are you'll have wifi access available in a lot more places than you'd think.
My laptop sees the beacons, but the bus has pulled off before it can finish associating, let alone transferring packets to and from the Internet. And I've found plenty of stores whose public Wi-Fi is limited to 30 minutes, after which the AP's captive portal enforces an hours-long cooldown period before the same MAC can regain an Internet connection. This hurts when I'm waiting for the roommate to finish shopping, eating, or whatever, or if the roommate has run into an old friend from her previous job.
But really, your use case falls outside of what a Chromebook is meant for.
Which is ultimately my point. Too many laptop makers disappoint me by selling only Chromebooks in the form factor I want, not something that better fits my use case.