Episode: 3242
Title: HPR3242: The eternal battle over how to run your chromebook is about to begin
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3242/hpr3242.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:36:17

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3242, for today the 5th of January 2021.
Today's show is entitled The Eternal Battle Over How To Run Your Chromebook In About To Begin.
It is hosted by Men Flota 2 and is about 148 minutes long and carries an exquisite flag.
The summary is Quill Vs Alien Chromebook Discussions.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Okay, this is going to be another public access.
Squirrel addresses Alien from another planet video.
And as you can see I have a desk running here and it is recording along with my normal
screen recorder. So this will be a joint video and joint audio podcast
and down here we have my, I need to get that to download again.
I got the G Potter running and I don't know it always fails downloading the brother's whisp.
But as you can see I've got Freedom Decrypted downloaded and I've also got the latest
GNU World Order, GNU World Order 383 on my G Potter podcasting thing which is what I usually
use to get my podcasts. And we're talking to you off of a brand new Google Pixelbook
go. It's a Chromebook, it's the I7, it's the big one. And I've decided to invest a few years time
in the Chromebook architecture and I have the Linux beta running and I'm using audacity
from the Linux beta repos, the devian repos and recording this podcast to from a Chromebook.
And the reason of which will become clear here in just a minute. Anyway let me go ahead and
minimize the G Potter and let it finish. And normally you know when I play a podcast I would just
click on for instance if I'm going to play GNU World Order I would just click on that and hit play.
But we're going to do things a different way at this time. We're going to use Google's Assistant
to play a podcast and I'm going to comment on it as we go through it. Okay Google,
play GNU World Order podcast.
Got it. The latest episode of New World Order Linuxcast. And in this episode
we're going to talk about Chromebooks. No, we're not. We're going to talk about Chromium
Books. So in this episode I wanted to kind of finally review. Pause. Now I can pause
this podcast but I wanted to make note that if you noticed on the screen if you're watching
the video version of this that it said that we were playing the GNU World Order 383 from Google
Podcasts which somewhat implies and I've been playing various podcasts all morning long and
implies that I guess Google is making a recording of the GNU World Order podcast as well as or
copy of it anyway and putting it on their servers as well as a number of other podcasts
which I think is cool I guess but it doesn't do anything if that's the case for the statistics
of the GNU World Order. Anyway this GNU World Order 383 episode happens to be about Chromebooks and
apparently Clat 2 the alien in question has purchased a used Chromebook and I've been working with
Chromebooks. It's amazing but you know every time I get into something like Chromebooks which I
did roughly a year ago I'm finding out that Clat 2 is also getting into them and I don't know if
it's a mind connection or what often we feel that ESP is to blame but the reality of it is is that
we the humans they all live in oceans of herd mentality and so across the school systems you find
that they're using Chromebooks in school systems and it's apparently they're using Chromebooks
in the school systems of New Zealand which is where Clat 2 lives now and so he's become interested
in them because I gather he he must work with kids teaching them Linux and maybe in a college
setting or something all right we're going to continue playing this now I can pause and resume
podcasts resume and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't
it does not appear to me that it's working let's just try playing it again from the beginning okay
Google play GNU world order podcast
you've got to play the latest episode three world order Linux
my name's new order under this episode three
Chromebook no we're not we're going to talk about chromium books so in this episode I wanted to
kind of finally review in a way the recent experience that I've had with Chromebooks and in order
to do that I guess I'll back up a little bit and talk about how I have very intentionally and
quite happily for a long time ignored Chromebooks Chromebooks came out well before I left the US
which was seven years ago now and it came out well before that so I'm going to say arbitrarily
10 years I could look that up but let's just call it 10 years for convenience sake 10 years ago
Chromebooks came out and I think it's fair to say at this point that they have made a rather
hefty impression at least here in New Zealand they are the default computer at most schools at most
what do you call them primary and secondary schools I guess like not university but for all the other
schools the lower schools and I think that's kind of a a general I think that's a pretty common
phenomenon and that's interesting to know because that means that there are a lot of computer users
out there with Chromebooks let's just put a pin in that we're going to come back to that point
in a moment so Chromebooks when they first came out I kind of ignored because as far as I knew
and I don't know this for sure because I didn't because I have I'm late to the game I've waited
like 10 years to even start investigating so my history of the subject is very much lacking but
we could say that at the time at least when they came out I was in uninterested in them because
as far as I knew their reputation was it was a hardware browser like it was it was an internet
browser and that was what it was and as far as I know back then that that was the case and as far
as I can tell now it seems to be by default that case and once again we'll come back to these
concepts and sort of revisit a lot of these in a little bit but that that's the reason that I
ignored Chrome Chromebooks for a very very long time well recently I kind of realized that there
are a lot of people out there as I've said with Chromebooks it's it's a computer that you are
very likely to run into and and I'm saying that as someone who was not looking to run into Chromebooks
and yet I still ran into them whether it was at computer stores and you know there'd be the obligatory
shelf of Chromebooks because it would be the back to school season and so there were Chromebooks for
sales so people could pick up a Chromebook for school that sort of thing or whether it was because
someone at a at a social event showed up with a Chromebook or someone's kid has a Chromebook
and they need to know how to do something on the Chromebook or whatever you just you start to
especially as a geek you start to run into them they're they're kind of unavoidable and when
that happens then you know that it's reached a certain certain capacity and so my my life as a
geek was starting to very very on the peripheral but I mean it was it was I was starting to notice
Chromebooks it was starting to be affected by the presence of Chromebooks and so finally I kind
of sat down and did a little bit of soul searching and thought okay well I have no interest in buying
a new computer I don't need one I'm I work from home now and I have all the computing devices
that I really technically need I mean I don't know if if one can ever have too many but you know
realistically had enough and and I don't like to purchase new hardware if I don't have to because
I feel like this world has produced enough hardware at this point that without any new purchases we
could all probably get another computer if we wanted one so I didn't want to purchase a new
computer but I I was very aware of the fact that my that there's a gap in my knowledge around
computing I mean there's a huge gap in that I don't really know Windows at all but that's that's
its own thing and I feel relatively okay with that personally because I my interest is in
POSIX systems and until Windows becomes a true POSIX system I I really don't honestly have
interest in it and I realize that that's 80% of the population or 75 or whatever it is of the
computer using population is probably on Windows and so it it does me very little good as a sort of
as a as a walking talking advertisement of maybe an alternative to know nothing about the platform
upon which people are are probably computing I realize that this is a big gap and we could
talk all day about whether it would be more advantageous to learn sort of the OS of the of the
opposition such that I could then better argue for the alternative or something like that I get that
I'm aware of it we don't need to bring that up right now it's a thing chrome books on the other
hand I felt well from what I understand it's based on Linux and it's probably a big deal that's
probably something that I should be more educated about so I started looking months ago now
for a used chrome book on the internet a long story short could not find one that wasn't like over
a hundred dollars and with the text not sure if it works that that kind of so it's really weird
like the the local resell market on computers is really really strange or at least especially
for chrome books it just seems like they don't go for very cheap and then even when they do go
for cheap which is not under a hundred dollars so cheap is a relative term obviously
even when they're going for like a hundred bucks there's there was often something about how the
thing was not actually working or the battery was completely gone or whatever so didn't really
comfortable it didn't feel comfortable buying a a truly sort of used you know I didn't I didn't
feel comfortable digging one out of the rubbish bin essentially because it was going to be expensive
and it was going to I felt like I was going to end up with a computer that may or may not even
work and I didn't want to invest that much effort into this I didn't want to get a a door stop
and try to resurrect it not not interested in learning it on those conditions so I I
eventually found a deal at one of the local hardware stores the computer stores where they had a
refurbished chrome book so it had been you did belong to to someone at some point and it had
gone back to the store not the factory just the store for you know as a returned item or whatever
and so they brushed it off and and freshened it up and made it look like new again and we're
selling it at a at a reasonable discount so I'm and I'm saying all of this because I just
one of the things that I want to talk about here is the the price the the value the bang for
your buck so I was able to purchase this Lenovo chrome book I think it's the CR340-11 which
if you go to Lenovo.com or whatever and look that model up you will see that it is no longer
available and that is again it was refurbished so it doesn't it's not a current model but it's
it's current enough and I purchased the thing for about let's say $450 New Zealand dollars
which is pricey I mean again cheap and expensive relative terms and I realize that and frankly
$450 but pause okay I can pause collateral courty hopefully I'll be able to resume at this time
but I will interject this squirrel's experience it was August of 2019 and I happened to be driving
into Muscogee Oklahoma for some reason I was going to tear some of the antique shops along the
the junk malls downtown and just look at old pots and stuff like that and I it got close to lunch
I think it was around 11 a.m. 11.30 and decided well I'm going to go eat and I went into a
hearties I think it was and got a hamburger because I'm not a vegan and french fries and
some diet drink which would really help me you know diet drink you always have to have a
diet drink when you get like a double you know anyway I noticed that right across the way from
this was an office depot and it had been some time since I was in an office depot so I thought
I'd go in there and take a look at what kind of computers they offered because you know I'm always
the kind of person that just picks up laptops you know I I buy more stinking computers than
probably anybody else in the planet and I went in there and I didn't see too many decent laptops
or even desktops it was all pretty garbagey which is unusual because usually office depot does have
a pretty premium collection of laptops in fact I remember seeing an x1 in one of their stores
what a year or so ago I didn't buy it but I just looked at it and I noticed a section on
Chromebooks and they had a sale on them and there are several different manufacturers of Chromebooks
as you know Lenova Dell acer and of course Google makes one and I don't know who else there's
probably another half dozen that I haven't mentioned and on the display case there was this big
acer with a huge screen and I thought was that a laptop and I know it's a Chromebook and it had
huge speakers and I played with it and it sounded great and so I bought it and the thing was like
I don't know it was $180 bread new 180 bucks and it had four gigs of RAM in it
and it had a very small storage device card of some kind I think it was like 64 gigabytes or
something inside I don't remember anyway it's sitting in the room next to me here I'm plugged
because after using that thing for an entire year in watching Chrome OS you evolved to a point
where now we can actually record podcasts using Audacity in a Chromebook I decided just a week ago
that I'm buying a Google Pixelbook go the i7 the big version because it has a full 16 gigabytes
of RAM and in the Linux beta I can run the here's the top Amazon result I just pushed a button
sorry about that I can run Figuita in the Linux beta using QMU and create a really tightly encrypted
volume that I can transfer over to an open BSD server and run it on other laptops so I noticed
that and I thought that's that's pretty cool because you know if I need to do anything ultra-private
I could do it in that I suppose anyway let's see if I can resume Class 2's podcast here resume
and I was afraid of that it's not working is it
Google's OS is still a little buggy when it comes to
okay Google resume nothing's playing right now oh that's great so you lost my new world order
podcast well anyway I just thought I would mention that you can play the new world order podcast
from the Google Assistant but if you've got this many things running in your Chromebook
it may not work correctly so what we'll do is we'll cheat and we'll run the downloaded version
of the good new world order and we'll play it in Audacity here you're listening to episode 383
of the good new world order my name is Class 2 and in this episode we're going to talk about
Chromebooks no we're not we're going to talk about Chromium books so in this and that is
correct he is actually going to talk about Chromium books so I'm going to skip forward a little bit here
and see if we can get to the point where he was talking about something else as he's moving along
to become like a little tablet although you're tablet now I guess has a keyboard in the back
which is kind of weird but you know whatever it's so it's it's a flip top or Chromebooks and yet
I still ran into them whether it was at computer stores and you know there'd be the obligatory
shelf of Chromebooks because it would be the back to school season and so there were Chromebooks
for sale so people could pick up a Chromebook for school that sort of thing or whether it was because
someone at a at a social event showed up with a Chromebook or someone's kid has a Chromebook and
they need to know how to do something on the Chromebook or whatever you just you start to especially
as a geek you start to run into them they're kind of unavoidable and when that happens then you
know that it's reached a certain certain capacity and so my my life as a geek was starting to very
very on the peripheral but I mean it was it was I was starting you know and I'm sorry for doing
this to you but most of my podcasts are low budget as in you know there's like morons doing
them but not low budget in many I spent quite a bit of money on this stuff but let's just let's
just keep going to notice Chromebooks it was starting to be affected by the presence of Chromebooks
and so finally I kind of sat down and did a little bit of soul searching and thought okay well
I have no interest in buying a new computer I don't need one I'm I work from home now and I have
all the computing devices that I really technically need I mean I don't know if if one can ever
have too many but you know realistically had enough and and I don't like to purchase new hardware
if I don't have to because I feel like this world has produced enough hardware at this point
that without any new purchases we could all probably get another computer if we wanted one so I
didn't want to purchase a new computer but I I was very aware of the fact that my that there's
a gap in my knowledge around computing I mean there's a huge gap in that I don't really know windows
at all but that's that's its own thing and I feel relatively okay with that personally because
I my interest is in POSIX systems and until Windows becomes a true POSIX system I really don't
honestly have interest in it and I realize that that's 80% of the population or 75 or whatever it
is of the computer using population is probably on Windows and so it it does me very little good
as a sort of as a as a walking talking advertisement of maybe an alternative to know nothing about
the platform upon which people are are probably computing I I realize that this is a a big gap
and we could talk all day about whether it would be more advantageous to learn sort of the OS of
the of the opposition such that I could then better argue for the alternative or something like that
I get that I'm aware of it we don't need to to bring that up right now it's a thing
Chromebooks on the other hand I felt well from what I understand it's based on Linux and it's
probably a big deal that's probably something that I should be more educated about so I started
looking months ago now for a used Chromebook on the internet a long story short could not find one
that wasn't like over a hundred dollars and with the text not sure if it works that that kind of
said it was really weird like the the local resell market on computers is really really strange
or at least especially for Chromebooks it just seems like they don't go for very cheap and then even
when they do go for cheap which is not under a hundred dollars so cheap is a relative term obviously
even when they're going for like a hundred bucks there's there was often something about how the
thing was not actually working or the battery was completely gone or whatever so didn't really
comfortable it didn't feel comfortable buying a a truly sort of used you know I didn't I didn't
feel comfortable digging one out of the rubbish bin essentially and you know I wanted to add
something to this conversation I guess having studied the Chromebook a little bit longer just
a couple months longer than glad to I guess and that I've discovered that basically all Chromebooks
have is all of them have a six month or I'm sorry a six year timer on them in other words
Chromium OS will support a particular platform a particular Chromebook that's been sold for six
years and then when they they just discontinue support for it so eventually at some point in time
I'd have to switch over to this Chromium OS that he's going to be talking about soon but in the
meantime I'm just going to use they built in OS that shipped with the unit but yeah you have a
six year limit before they will discontinue support for it in which case in theory your unit is dead
you know and I paid what was it 1300 dollars I guess for this expensive unit and it's much smaller
and lighter than the acer Chromebook that I have in the other room smaller screen but it does have
the the 4k whatever you want to call it ultra high definition and the display is fantastic I mean
it's it's better than any other laptop I have and as you might be able to to kind of detect
from the video I'm making it's just unreal it really is so let's continue on with tattoos I'm
going to be commenting on tattoos podcast because I feel that I need to throw in things because
it was going to be expensive and it was going to I was I felt like I was going to end up with
a computer that may or may not even work and I didn't want to invest that much effort into this
I didn't want to get a a door stop and try to resurrect it not not interested in learning it on
those conditions so I I eventually found a deal at one of the local hardware stores the computer
stores where they had a refurbished Chromebook so it had been it had belonged to someone at some
point and it had gone back to the store not the factory just the store for you know as a return
item or whatever and so they brushed it off and and freshened it up and made it look like new again
and we're selling it at a at a reasonable discount so I'm and I'm saying all of this because I just
one of the things that I want to talk about here is the the price the the value the bang for your buck
so I was able to purchase this Lenovo Chromebook I think it's the CR340-11 which if you go to
Lenovo.com or whatever and look that model up you will see that it is no longer available and
that is again it was refurbished so it doesn't it's not a current model but it's it's current enough
and I purchased the thing for about let's say 450 New Zealand dollars which is pricey I mean again
cheap and expensive relative terms and I realized that and frankly 450 bucks seven years ago to
me would have been prohibitive and and that would that would have been expensive today it's it hurts
it's it's a chunk of change but I was able to sort of I was able to justify the purchase and
to make the purchase I mean more than just justifying it I had that money lying around for sort
of personal development and learning new things and so I was able to do that with a relatively
clear conscience now 450 bucks again it depends on where you sort of sit how you were you know
where where you were raised what your experience was as a as a young person with money mine was
okay as a kid and then as a young adult I could sort of dipped pretty far down into sort of the
poverty zone and have been working pretty pretty steadily you know within the past well very
steadily within the past probably ten ten years or so so so yeah the the money was there it
did hurt though 450 bucks and then I started looking at other computer options like if I hadn't
gone for a Chromebook you know and and I believe me as I was doing this as I was shopping I was
thinking maybe maybe I should just stop not get a Chromebook and just get another laptop and look
into the options for installing Chrome OS or whatever onto that laptop because I understood at the
time that that might be possible and I'll talk about more about that in a moment so I thought
maybe that's what I'll try and so I was looking at other laptops and I was quickly realizing that
no 450 dollars New Zealand dollars is quite quite reasonable for a laptop and and certainly certain
brands of computers are literally a thousand dollars more than what I just 450 plus a thousand
just for the starting for the bottom line so I thought okay this is actually a really reasonably
priced laptop make really it is it is not free and and free is better zero dollars is definitely
better than four hundred and fifty dollars and as I've said before if you are a geek and you need
a laptop and you have zero money then you can sometimes make a really really sweet score by finding
somebody who needs help transferring their data from their old computer to their new computer
or they need help you know you're racing the data off of their old computer or they have a
computer that they that that has broken and they need you to just grab the data off of it or
or whatever very frequently you can find people who need geek help and are willing to essentially
pay for your services with free hardware and that is how I got a lot of my hardware very early on so
that's zero dollars this is four hundred and fifty dollars take that take that for what it's worth
you know that take it take that value for whatever it's worth what I'm gonna say about four hundred
and fifty dollars for this particular piece of hardware is that kind of blew my mind four hundred
and fifty dollars for this little laptop that I have now have is pretty amazing like the form factor
I would I would liken to a MacBook Air perhaps like that's that's what comes immediately to mind
without having and you know that's the thing that comes to my mind even though I have never owned
any Apple products at all I've had my hands on a Macintosh like 20 years ago or something 20 25
years ago you know in the late 80s but I never got interested in in any of Apple's infrastructure
because when I was you know a teenager before Vietnam I worked for a geophysical company in Tulsa
and I key punched operated Fortran programs on cards and these cards would be read through a key
punch reader which would be transferred to a electronic tape after they had been turned into
assembler and then that tape would be taken into the main machine room and processed against data
so that we could make three dimensional maps of oil fields you know we could see 18 miles into
the ground what a a actual pool of oil and other water resources look like in 3D that was in the
1960s American it's much better today then anyway if I were to talk about any that I would have
been putting jail for like 40 years or something you know and I also learned how to write software
for three dimensional plotters or plotter plotter machines back then because how we did it was we
plotted the maps one layer at a time in different ink colors on these plotter tables and there were
huge sheets of paper then we would hang them from racks on the ceiling and you could just walk past
the papers and you could get it an idea of what we're talking about what's underneath the ground
by the images that you see drawn on the paper you know the papers would be spread a couple feet
apart hanging from the ceiling so you could literally walk and investor down that row
and they could see as you got deeper and deeper what the pool look like and where you needed to
drill your hole anyway I get too far into my own history I do you know when I was 14 I started
working on geophysical crews and that was years before OSHA was invented in 1979 and you know I
actually handled dynamite when I was like 15 you know explosives and stuff so that they could
shake the earth and record the sounds coming back in the geophones and I also knew how to repair
geophones being a hammered or operator I mentioned that before you know from the 60s so I would repair
geophone lines and work on the equipment and stuff like that so I was a very geeky kid
in the 1960s in the moon shot decade let's go forward here clad to of course his background is
in McIntosh and he grew up in the 90s using McIntosh's because I guess that's what his parents bought
you know that's what they started in that's how he started his competing environment and he's
comparing this to this this chrome book experience to McIntosh and you know this pixel book is so
lied it's only a couple pounds and it's got such a fantastic screen and it's so frigging mind
blowingly fast it just blows your mind but it does upset me a little bit when google assistant won't
resume my new world order 383 podcast so that I don't have to start up adacious and redo everything
and look like you know let's grow more on anyway let's go on with this and done any kind of
side by side comparison because I don't have access to a MacBook Air so that that's where I would
place its form factor and in many ways it is better than that because the screen flips over to become
like a little tablet all the way your tablet now I guess has a keyboard in the back which is kind of
weird but you know whatever it's so it's it's a flip top or whatever it's got a touch screen which
I've actually not really used much at all I'm just not used to touching sort of a screen that's
weird to me it's got one of those weird sort of chiclet keyboards or whatever they're calling them
these days but it's got two USB ports and an micro SD card slot and it looks like a USB-C
and then the power port which I don't know if that's that double as a USB-C I'm not really sure
oh and a audio jack a single audio jack so yeah I mean that it it it definitely for $450
I upon seeing it and experiencing it I felt like I was getting more computer than I had paid for
especially since I have paid for I mean I paid for I purchased a bulk of a couple of laptops
uh for for a school for an organization once and they were $300 laptops I think it was $300
and they were nowhere near this nice and that was a couple of years ago so I felt like I don't know
I felt like the value has gone up for that amount of money um yeah so pretty pretty happy with the
hardware from from from the start from from the moment I opened it and and sort of felt it I felt
like 450 well spent possibly now I still had the operating system to tackle right and and and
and that's that's something that's that's a big deal that's that's the main thing you could argue
I mean if I'd hated the hardware at least I could just sit it up on a shelf somewhere and SSH
into it or something but I mean this is this is it this is the OS this is the this is the thing
that you interface with so uh let's take this in two stages the before the coffee break stage will
be the default chrome OS experience and after the break will be the non default chrome OS experience
that's the one that we actually care about but we may as well again because part of this exercise
for me at least was to to know and understand and experience what other people out there like lots of
other people out there are experiencing as a computing platform I don't think this will take a
long because there's not a whole lot to it to be fair but I I'm gonna try to be relatively objective
here um and and don't mistake my objectivity for acquiescence or for even praise necessarily it
is true objectivity so turn the computer on and it boots up to you know the chrome OS thing and
the initial couple of screens have you sign in to your account now if you don't have an account you
can create a google account so this was like my I don't know 18th sort of throw away google account
that I've I've created and that is the that's the thing that you log into you you log in to your
computer by logging into your gmail account which feels very strange and very unsettling however
it works like it it has local awareness of your identity you can log into your computer without
a network connection it's fine it doesn't it it's not like oh if you don't have access to the
internet you no longer have access to your computer now once you're in the computer what do you
have access to that gets a little bit trickier because certainly if you have things that are saved
on your in your google drive then you have local access to sort of the cashed version of that
and you could work on that and I guess your mind kind of goes immediately if you're like me at least
to the the edge cases and you think well what about the time when I've got my chrome book and I've
been working on my document and I don't have internet and then I I don't have my chrome book and
I do have internet and I pull up that document and now my changes aren't there or what happens if
I work on something online at work or at school and that's in my google drive and then I go
onto my chrome book and I don't have internet so now I don't have access to the new the newest
addition of my work or version of my work and you know he's brought up an interesting subject
I've barely even used google's drive but you know when you buy a new chrome book and I've done it
twice now in the last couple of years you get the 16 gigabytes of storage they give you for free
you know and you can buy more but as you know I'm a big open BSD user and and the video side if
you're watching the video version of this I'll just open a terminal and I'll type in my magic
macro name of server and that takes me right to my open BSD server cabang see and there we are in
tmux and I store all my stuff on my multi gigabyte open BSD server so I haven't yet decided to
use google drive for anything other than the apps that I buy and I I did buy a one year lease to
use this video recorder that I'm making the video with because Linux does not the Linux beta
doesn't support video recording from inside the Linux container however you can set a switch
inside the Linux beta which I'll show you here in a minute as soon as he starts complaining about
it on how you can record audio from inside the Linux container so it's this sort of fear of
being out of sync and I imagine that could be a problem realistically like that could that could
happen and it takes exactly one time I would imagine for that to happen for you to lose confidence
in that model but I also feel like you would develop a certain sensibility around your internet
feasibility you would kind of know I think if you had a Chromebook I think you would have to develop
a sense for okay well where am I where am I going and what's the reasonable expectation about whether
I'll have internet or not and and also I think the idea would be that you would have your Chromebook
and therefore you wouldn't be working on another device like that wouldn't be part of your workflow
you would you would be working on your Chromebook so of course the other thing you could do is you
could get a T-Mobile phone which has a built-in Wi-Fi you know which I have it's at Nexus 9 that's
like I don't know four years old now and I'm still keeping it because it costs me $900 and they
charge me 60 bucks a month for this service and it's unlimited internet and I just turn the Wi-Fi
on the phone and then I just logged my Chromebook right into that no problem and that way you you always
have internet anywhere you go in the United States of course the class you you see he's
living in New Zealand and he might be able to do something like that New Zealand but when he comes
back to the United States to attend a Red Hat conference or something he might find that he has to
find a a landline ground-based Wi-Fi source somewhere to use his Chromebook if you were to do that
of course if you took a Chromebook into a Red Hat conference they'd probably
take a nail gun out and nail him to a pre-fabricated cross as some kind and
standing upright outside the yard I guess I don't know whether you had internet or not you would
have the latest version of your work because that's always on your Chromebook and if you've never
used one then you'll you would you would be maybe a little bit fooled by how the applications appear
to be self-standing applications and and they do a really interesting job of turning the web browser
inside out but if you could imagine if you've never used a Chromebook if you imagine a computer
full of electron applications electron being that framework where you can build cross-platform
applications because it's built on I think WebKit or something like that and it's essentially a
JavaScript HTML CSS application that runs locally on on your computer you can see that in action
with for instance signal signal and what's what's the other one that I know of I don't remember it
but yeah there's a couple out oh Adam ATOM I'm pretty sure I think that's an electron application
I could be wrong anyway it's you'll you'll see it if you look hard enough electron applications
it's a pretty big stack for a local application but what Chrome OS apparently has done is it
sort of takes all of these web apps and and I say turn them inside out because you'll you'll you'll
hit your little application button which by default is the caps lock although I've I've I've
remapped that but more on that later I guess and then type in something that you're searching for
like calculator and apparently there's not a calculator on on this particular machine and I'll
explain why that might be the case again in a little bit so either way you could look through
oh there there's one files so actually I don't know if that's one of them anyway my point is
do a point and that is that they've they've exploded all of these applications that normally would be
apps sort of within your Google application suite and they've made them into apparently self-standing
apps but but really it's it's just tabs that have been taken out of the browser get rid of the
the browser window decoration and menu options that wouldn't be relevant in that situation
and just give you the app part and that's pretty much the experience that is Chrome OS it was like
out of the box that's Chrome OS I think that's it um it's a bit weird you know like um for for
someone who wants to be who wants to use the computer as a computer that does feel very limiting
it did not take me long to continue past that part of the experience it was as dismal as I'd
expected like that was the Chrome OS experience that I had feared and it was exactly as I'd expected
it was it was here is a browser and here are the five or six applications that Google
applications suite happens to offer none of which I use in real life so and frankly none of which
are very useful to to my my interests none of these had things that interested me in any way
like even Google docs which is kind of their word processor well it's not kind of there is
their word processor even that didn't really hold any interest for me because I wanted to write
in plain text and Google docs doesn't really understand that concept it doesn't know really how
to how to treat plain text I mean you can style it in a certain way so that it looks like plain
text and then you can I guess export it as plain text although of course that's not the intention
Google Drive expects it to be an entity that files be an entity within your Google Drive
that there's a a certain almost hyper integration to it if that's even the right word I guess
what I'm really trying to say is it's very difficult once you're in Chrome OS as far as I can tell
by default to extricate your the data that you believe you are saving out of Google and that is
obviously the intent that is exactly what Google intends and it is not I don't think it's a
bad idea interestingly shockingly like I get it I you know what I don't think they're trying to
create a lock-in personally I think they're trying to offer some services the more I study this
but I mean I've got the flat pack for labor office installed right here and I can launch that
to show you and it's got the latest library office 7.03 I guess it is or whatever it is
installed and I just pull this thing up and start writing away and I can store these documents
on my Google Drive or as I'm doing put them on my Open BSD server and there doesn't seem to be any
lock-in here that I can see I mean you you have multiple ways to get out of it it's just that they
offer a lot of commercial apps especially in that Android Play Store that are rather hit and
messes to whether they exactly work right or not and some of them require you to put down money
for instance the Chromium extension that I'm using to record this video it's 45 bucks a year I
think is what they want plus they have another editor that you can buy for another 45 bucks a year
which I'm not doing because I'm using Kaden Live and Open Shot video editors with Blender
inside the Linux beta so I don't really need it I just downloaded my video from the drive and
do my processing if there's anything to be done really do I I totally get it and if there was
for instance a next cloud OS whereby it doesn't have to be the bootable OS understand I guess
would be more like a next cloud desktop whereby you would boot into your Chrome OS or you know
whatever your future pretend cloud computer you boot into that and your desktop is an exploded
turned inside out kind of expression of of your next cloud instance then that would work really
well for me to be honest like that would be great if I could just interface directly with all of
my next cloud components but as individual apps and all my files would be saved into my next cloud
instance that that makes sense like it makes a hundred percent sense to me and it's it is
honestly not a bad a bad idea at all and you could certainly do that with a stock Chromebook
I refuse to put that on my Open BSD server because of security issues I think they need to
improve upon that quite a bit before I'll let that get installed in my server but for me personally
I can just use the SSHFS the fuse file system and mount one of the volumes of my Open BSD server
use the applications that I have locally installed here on the Chromebook and essentially do
the same thing what I'd be missing is a calendar I guess and stuff like that but you know when it comes
to working online the little bit that I do I don't mind using Google docs and Google's
calendar to take care of the few little tasks that I have to do and you know considering my age
but I could see where people would want to write in a free format like a library office or
man docs or something like that if you were actually doing some development and you can do
that no one explaining anyway and I don't know if if you dear listener were personally lucky enough
to see some of the mid 2000s like 2006 7-8 that time frame there were some really interesting
experiments around operating systems that existed like desktops that existed in your web browser
so you could open up into a web browser go to this location one of them was called iOS
e-y-e-o-s which I think I think someone grabbed that domain since and it's a completely different thing
but at the time it was something like iOS dot something or another you would go there and
it's probably just either com or net or or because I don't think they had yeah they didn't have
a bunch of fancy domain top level domains back then but you go there and you would log in and
your browser screen would become a desktop and you are more importantly you could just install a thin
client on a digital ocean server and access that that machine as a thin client you could do that too
I mean that that technology has been available for 30 years now right at least 20 years
you know 30 years actually it's been available for 30 years so you you could install a
X server on a digital ocean or a machine like I've got here I could do a thin client with OpenBSD
and literally run an OpenBSD desktop but you know there are many ways to solve this problem
I think the reason why people buy Chromebooks and why I've become interested in it is
I view Google's Chromebook and it's software as an enhancement to my already free G&U experience
it's an enhancement you know it's not something that I have to take or use it's there if I want it
like Google Assistant and stuff like that but I I'm not required I don't have to push it but
and if I don't want to so in other words it's an enhanced OS and when you start going back
into the GNU framework where you're just running GNU only like you're running Trisco or something
or OpenBSD you don't have these enhancements they're not available at your fingertips
so kind of the way I view using a Chromebook is I get the pretty much the best of all the worlds
the best of all of them the commercial junk that you hate the spying and everything else what you
get with anywhere browse you installed an any operating system Firefox even you you'd be spied on
you'd be tracked you know you you can't get away from it so you get but you get all the enhancements
of all the cool software that they offer but you also get the complete volume of free software
GPG licensed or BSD licensed software that you normally use in your open environments you know
it's it's the best of all worlds combined plus I might add that if you leave it as a Chromebook
you know Google does updates about once every month or two and it really reminds me of the days
of running CrunchBang Linux Philip Newberg I or Newborn or is it Newborn or Newberg excuse me
Philip if you're listening but it reminds me I've got several CrunchBang Linux cops and cups and
shirts around the house I really love CrunchBang Linux but it was a an operating system that was
always there it never screwed up on you and it was always dependable now can I say that about the
Chromebook well you just saw me not be able to resume the new world or the podcast because
something's overloaded the system I mean they still got some bugs to work out but and you'd
occasionally have problems of course with CrunchBang Linux but it was a relatively unchanging
stable operating system that I don't have to do any maintenance on it's just done for me
automatically I mean at the most I might have to go to the Play Store and update a few apps
every month and then run in the Linux beta and update slash apt upgrade and upgrade things there
and other than that it remains a very stable environment and someday it won't be a Linux
beta anymore they'll have full functionality including using OBS Studio to record the desktop
which they don't currently have and really when you sit down in front of a Chromebook you you're
not going to be able to tell the difference the the worlds will be completely integrated completely
integrated so again I view it as you're getting the best of of all of it this is the the pinnacle the
peak of the margins between open source and proprietary software you you had of a little menu at
the bottom of the of the window and you click on your applications and launch a little text editor
inside of there and so it was like a it was a window into this sort of cloud based operating
system and it was a fascinating idea I mean it's it felt as clunky as it sounds you know I mean
it is it's it's like it's like a virtual machine with no integration with your host whatsoever
but and it lived in the browser so if the browser crashed or if you I don't know closed the browser
without thinking about it or something then it went away but it was a really fascinating idea
and I feel like this is kind of that idea that that's that's this content that's the continuation of
that concept here in Chrome OS so what I'm really really trying to impress upon you dear listener is
this is not a bad idea if if you are a person with your your and you you have progressed beyond
physical thumb drives and your your your USB thumb drive is the cloud which is a completely
reasonable thing especially with something like next cloud where you you own the hardware and the
software running this little quote unquote cloud then then having a computer that just kind of
interfaces directly with that and the synchronization is always on it felt very natural the only
thing that felt unnatural was the ecosystem the actual the cloud that I was on and and I had
no interest in interfacing with the Google Cloud and it turns out to the surprise of probably no
one Chrome OS is not the right tool for someone who does not want to get involved with Google
before we walk away from the default Chrome OS experience I do want to mention the Google Play
Store because it is a significant part of the default experience of Chrome OS as I understand
that it is relatively new and I don't know what that means because new to me is everything
about Chrome OS having just gotten involved with it sort of three weeks ago but so I mean you know
when I say new it could be five years ago it could be seven years ago it could be yesterday I don't
know but at some point the Google Play Store was opened up to Chrome OS users and what that means is
that just as people can install applications on an Android phone they can also install it on Chrome OS
that's a big deal because if you think about what Chrome OS is which is a web browser with
Google web apps then the Android Play Store the Google Play Store offers everything else so you name
it if you're looking for I don't know games I guess are on the Play Store I don't know a voice
recorder that was that's that's something that you're looking to record a podcast you can't do that
on Chrome OS I mean you can if you find some kind of cloud based voice recording service which I'm
sure there are many out there but what if you want to do this locally well you could find a voice
recording app in the Play Store and run that maybe you don't like I don't know the text editing
options you want to do something you don't you don't use Google Docs you want to use a text
editing app well you could maybe you could find that in the Google Play Store so in other words
applications really honestly like all all applications that you want to run that aren't in a
browser Google Play Store is able to to to provide some something I don't know if it's an alternative
because in many cases it's not an alternative it is it is the only alternative it's the only
thing you've got to use so it's huge that the Play Store is available to Chrome OS users and I don't
know you know I don't know I haven't like I say I've ignored Chromebooks for so long at this
point that I I don't know how common it is for people to to take advantage of that I don't know
if it's something that people do frequently I don't even know if most people have the ability to
because I I do understand to to a limited degree I understand that Chromebooks are probably very
frequently managed devices so you may as a user not have the ability to install something from Play
Store because maybe you don't have you know someone's limiting your ability to to to do that which
and concerning that the Play Store apps that won't run on a Chromebook you know Android apps
for instance anything that involves GPS like a GPS program that will show you the satellite
constellation or give you your elevation or your exact latitude and launch date you cannot run
on a Chromebook because for some reason even on the most expensive Chromebooks that they sell
there is no GPS receiver which kind of surprised me there's no GPS receiver so I can't use this
as a map while I drive in my pickup truck across the country you know I can't use Google Maps and
navigate like I can with an Android phone and that's a shame because the pixel book go has a
battery life of about 10 hours I've actually been walking around here with a lid closed and just
opening it occasionally and I've had this thing running for over 24 hours because I often will
just sit close the unit up and sit it next to me while I'm reading a book or doing something else
or I'm out in the patio and then I'll open it to access some information read the news or
play a podcast or play a video or something and it just lasts forever so it's at least in my
unit with that kind of battery life if they had a GPS receiver would be great the other option
that may be available I haven't really investigated it but that would be to get
4 and 5G access straight into the Chromebook so I don't have to have an Android phone with a Wi-Fi
you know a Wi-Fi built into it to allow me to gain internet access on the Chromebook you know I
I'd buy a a LTE device of some kind 4G you know modem interface to access the cell towers
if they could integrate it in with the laptop I mean that would make it even better as well
but yeah it did make me wonder why Google of all people didn't put a GPS and offer a setup to where
we could just sign up with a provider perhaps you can if you go to a T-Mobile store and
bought your Chromebook there you know and maybe you could have done it that way but
and maybe they have some plug-in dongles that will allow you to get GPS and cell phone access to
I haven't investigated that either but a lot of that sort of technology won't be available if
you switch over to Chromium OS and get away from it and start running after I know that you
know you might not be able to to access that's on it's kind of stuff so there's a downside to
going from a straight Chromebook to you know hacking one over to Chromium OS and running
FJord and stuff like that limits you know the devices usefulness in many ways anyway so that's
it's a pity but I mean yeah sometimes that's that's the goal of the devices to just be a device
for a specific set of apps so for managed managed devices I can imagine that
that none of these sort of workarounds are going to do anything because the the device is strictly
maintained by some other entity other than yourself but if that's not the case then Google Play
Store is there and so the default you know like the the normal everyday user who's who just
purchased a Chromebook off the shelf what they're getting is a web browser they're getting some
Google web apps and they're getting access to all of the Android apps that exist on sorry all
of the Android apps that exist on the Play Store that's a that's an important thing to realize now
I know and what you're thinking you're thinking I don't use the Play Store I use FJord and so I
would if I were going to do this I would just load FJord apps on my Chrome OS well you you could
definitely try to do that the Chrome OS will stop you it recognizes that the application that you're
trying to install that that APK that you're trying to install on your device is not a Play Store
authorized or verified whatever app and so it will not let you install the FJord app on Chrome OS
without you working around it's it's preventative measures and I don't want to go into that because
that's not the default Chrome OS experience what I've just described is the default Chrome OS
experience and I have to admit that if you are okay with living your life within Google's
guys then the default Chromebook experience is not bad I mean it's not bad in the same way that
you know I don't know I guess Mac experience isn't bad if you're okay with just doing whatever Mac
tells you to do or Apple tells you to do Windows isn't bad as long as you're okay with just letting
Microsoft decide arbitrarily what you're not authorized to do yes it's it's not great but at the same
time like in terms of using a computer purchasing a computer and then sitting down at a desk and
using the thing I have to say in a weird way it's it's it's not as bad as I'd expected it was
sort of like yeah I could there is use here I could see how a person if I was if I really put
myself into someone else's shoes I can imagine how a person could do work as long as they live in
a browser and I know a lot of people really really do they they use online services left and
right and so this would feel like a very reasonable if not restrictive platform for them and I think
in a way and hear me out here I think in a way Google has successfully called people's bluffs what I
mean by that is for many many years now we Linux users have been telling people if you do not like
macOS if you do not like windows then you can come over to Linux and use Linux and it will do
everything that you need it to do and people have sometimes ignored us outright other times they
have taken us up on the challenge and they've tried Linux for a day and sometimes I mean to be
to be fair you know sometimes people try it for quite a long times so often it seems like they
they encounter some kind of block something that doesn't work the way they need it or want it to
work immediately and they say well there you go I gave it a try and I just can't do this thing and
so I'm going to walk away from Linux or I'm not going to ever try Linux or whatever the
the scenario might be and I have often been rather suspect of that I've always felt like there
was a little bit of something disingenuous about that and I feel like Google because maybe because
they have because they're Google they have lots of money they've been able to to get the Chromebook
into lots of hands I feel like they have truly they have they've they've told people look if you don't
like Mac you know like windows you can try a Chromebook and people have been trying it and for whatever
reason people when they try that they say oh well this doesn't do this thing this doesn't this isn't
working the way that I need it to or whatever instead of just dropping it they find a workaround now
why are people willing to find that workaround for Chrome OS and they haven't been willing to
find that workaround for Linux I I think there there are probably lots of different factors
going on here I mean I think probably one of the one of the reasons is it's Google it's a branded
product and people in today's world they love branded products they just that's not the reason I
bought it they love to feel like there's a company out there taking them under their
under its protective wing and so if you just stick with Chrome Chrome OS and Chrome your Chromebook
device and and just work work with Google to solve your problems it'll be fine whereas Linux you
don't you don't really have that sort of figurehead Linux I look at it as a challenge you know
Google may try to prevent me from doing something but I'll get around it it's just it's another
challenge view it as a challenge it's is famously disparate there there is no central
Linux thing to sort of latch on to if you're the person who needs the central thing to latch on to
not everyone does but I think the people who don't are probably comfortably okay they're
Linux users and the people who do I think are latching on to some some figurehead whether it's
the Google logo or the Apple logo or the Windows logo so you've got that going on I think you
also have the the cost of the the barrier of entry which is the cost and and when you spend
money on a device you are frequently more likely to work with that device and I remember back
in the 2000 somethings 2006 I guess everything happens in 2006 the triple EPC came out and it
distributed Linux on the device and it was a different form factor and it shook the foundations
of the computing industry it made lots of different companies think very differently about what
a laptop was and could be and was expected to be and I think it's it's arguable that it even
ushered in the the the era of tablets and things like that and portable devices and and certainly
the lightweight laptops so I mean it was it was huge and yet even then even that computer people
people took and installed Windows XP onto instead of of Windows so I think there's the this
margin of escape that Chromebook by ensuring that it's OS is this immutable untouchable OS
image somewhere on your machine that you don't really even have control over or knowledge of
like a phone practically the mobile device there there's no way for you to put something else
on that this is it you get Chrome OS that's what you've got on this hardware device I know and in
some cases with people like me that switch operating systems on certain laptops virtually every week
it's a sharp relief because you know now I can't I'm forced to stay with this one
it's just fine it's just like the experience I was talking about like running crunch bang Linux
when I got hooked on crunch bang Linux I found myself stuck on that for it was like six years
and then he discontinued it I mean I couldn't get away from it I put it on everything and it's just
one of those operating systems that appeals to you because of its simplicity and because it's a
Chromebook I no longer have to maintain it you know it will enhance itself like arch Linux
periodically for the next six years and then I'll have to buy another Chromebook to get more
modern hardware and just start the process all over again which seems reasonable because that's
pretty much what we were doing when we were running crunch bang or slackware or what have you
opened BSD you know you'd run a laptop for four or five years and you get tired of it
give it to somebody and go buy you a new one you don't get to back out of that decision that's
the decision that you've made and you get to work around that decision or if you're wealthy enough
then you just write it off you just give it to your kid and and get yourself a different computer
that you like better or something like that I do think there's a little bit of the investment syndrome
you've invested in this thing and darn it you're going to make it work and you know that's true too
I put good money into this and I want it to make it work and I see that Google is progressing
along to where we'll be able to do everything that we did in a Linux environment here on the Chrome
book OS anyway it's going to happen so it just doesn't make any sense plus a Google does better
security I think then any other Linux distro I know of you know could do I mean they're they're
going to be a very security conscience company and Chromebook is their primary product I mean this
is this is the thing that Google's thrown the most money in that they're not likely to walk away
from but if they did if they did walk away from it then Chromium OS had begun as well and we would
all be installing something like Linux men in our Chromebooks probably I think it's really
interesting though I think there's a lot or there's something to be learned there and I don't
know if Linux can act upon those lessons because Linux as I say it isn't an entity that's not a
single thing that can that can sort of respond to that same you can't leverage the same tricks
you can't play the same tricks on our public that that Chromebook and Mac OS arguably and Windows
plays so an interesting thing to take note of let's go get coffee and then we'll come back
and we're going to talk about the other side of this whole equation and it's full of open source
so get ready for it
I really want to set the stage here I'm assuming you have coffee I want to set the stage here I had
made the decision to get a Chromebook that was something that I was going to do I just decided
that I had to learn more about this platform it was time for me to stop stammering and admitting
ignorance whenever anyone asked me about a Chromebook I wanted the experience I didn't do a whole
lot of research before purchasing and I want to emphasize that because I was very much diving into
something unknown and I really felt like I had just taken $450 out of my pocket and burned it
because I I but I mean that was the price of doing business I thought I'm a computer person
arguably an expert in computers I mean if you ask you know my neighbors that's what I am so
that that's that's the part I'm going to play here I'm going to invest in this computer going to
be horrible and and maybe after I spend the money and realize that this is a just an an abysmal
platform that no one should ever use I will be able to get rid of the computer to a good you know
give it to a good home maybe some kid in the neighborhood or in the town will not have the money
for a Chromebook required for school and so I can just donate it so that was what was going through
my head I got the default experience I was not overjoyed with it impressed but not overjoyed
and I should have I should mention too when you turn the thing on you know when you're logging
into your Google account and stuff that the initial setup stage it does have really good accessibility
features so if you're looking for a laptop for someone with low vision low mobility whatever this
is not you know that they've got options for it more options I think more options haven't looked
at some lately but yeah I mean it's it's really good it's really good I mean it it still suffers
from the problem of not being on by default and so you're in other words visually prompting a
blind person to turn on an optional speech screen reader function so I mean that's not going to work
for a blind person someone will have to be there for the blind person to to know when and where and
how to turn that feature on so that's a problem it's a pretty typical problem to be honest you
find that in a lot of devices it I would say most most companies don't don't ever think about that
that you know they they're they're they're asking you to to point at a little button on screen
and turn on mobility accessibility features but if you don't have good mobility then that could be
very challenging for you these features I feel like especially during that initial setup phase
should just be on first and then people can turn them off as part of the setup but they it shouldn't
be off and then be able to be turned on by the people who cannot respond to the prompt really
strange oversight that I just I can't imagine why no usability person in any company seems to
have thought of that well I shouldn't say no usability person in any company someone thought of
it at Apple because it is on by default last time I heard anyway it's it's a good experience like
I said it's as good as any other experience that you're going to have on a consumer device luckily
for me as a consumer there are options you can do other things with your Chrome OS device other
than sign into Chrome OS and use a Google computer you can instead well okay I'm going to do
this in faces here's what we here's what you can do you can have Chrome OS on your Chrome
book and you can activate what is called the Linux beta the Linux beta is a feature on Chromebook
that allows you to run Linux applications on your Linux computer it's an amazing amazing feature
the way that they implement this is a little bit surprising to me they you're not so the Chrome
the Chrome platform is based on Linux I want to emphasize that this is I I would have to argue
that I mean like I guess I would have to surmise I would have to theorize that this is how
BSD people must have felt when macOS came out with a bunch of you BSD utilities now that to be
fair always has confused me because it's not like macOS is running a literal BSD kernel it just
has a bunch of BSD utilities on it which I mean that is cool and all but that's it's not really
people say oh macOS is BSD but I mean it's not really it's it's it's running a different kernel
and it has it's borrowed a lot of ideas and stuff from BSD so I never really got the whole idea
that mac was BSD I never quite understood that but anyway this is Linux like this is actually Linux
you can you can you can you can look into the file system I mean not not by default that's not
the experience we're going for right now we're past the default chromos experience but this is
a Linux device which I think if I'd known if I'd really understood that and I think that's why
people early on within the Linux community were excited about Chromebooks a little more excited
about Chromebooks than I sort of thought reasonable but I mean it is a Linux device so this is kind
of amazing however many Chromebooks are out there just just like even my think more so than
Android phones I mean not necessarily more so but like really yeah I mean this is like a computer
running a Linux kernel and lots and lots of people are using it it's kind of amazing if you think
about it now it's all hidden and so you can go into your settings and activate this Linux beta feature
and you can do this just as a normal user I mean again we'll assume that the the question of
managed devices is not entering the equation here because I don't have any experience with that
and I assume that that would restrict all kinds of things so we won't we won't talk about managed
devices but if you own your device and you manage it yourself you can go in and turn on Linux beta
and it it offers to partition your hard drive such as it may be I mean the Chromebooks you know
part of the theory here is that you don't need a whole lot of local storage everything's going
to go up to Google so you're not partitioning your Google drive you know you're you're partitioning
whatever physical media there actually is on you know embedded in your computer I would all right
well the Linux beta is in fact a container when you run QMU you cannot access the things like
KVM to speed it up you know you can't run the KVM module not from inside a container
it's not going to work that way so you can run QMU as a normal user
it gives you out of the four processors I have in the size seven it gives you two of them
and it keeps the other two for the Chromebook OS parent
you do get access to the full 16 gigabytes of RAM so I can run stuff like Figuita and really stack
the RAM up with programs and stuff there is 128 gigabyte hypersonic SSD that this particular
Chromebook that I've got runs on and you can tell it to give it any portion of that volume
actually 256 gigabytes in it excuse me it's 256 gigabytes in this model so I gave my Linux
partition 100 gigabytes so I've got plenty of room to play around with and and create volumes
and all kinds of things but you cannot access things like your you can't access a USB
pin drive that you might plug in from your Linux container you can't do it you can't access
Google Drive however I can use SSHFS to get just gigabytes of storage up in my OpenBSD server which is
how I resolve my problem excuse me if you have limited storage you can use SSHFS and ramp up some
storage pretty quickly that way over the network you can do that but at any rate let's
Clity was having problems he said getting audio to work in the Linux container so for those of you
watching the video and I will explain things as I push buttons if you go down here and you push
on the time on your on your little bar then go up to your your settings button and push that
and then scroll down when that comes up to your Linux beta and then explode your Linux beta tab
you'll see down here they've added and I happen to be on Chromebook 87 by now it's we're on the
87 upgrade allow Linux to access your microphone and I have that clicked yes in which case it will
ask you to restart your container to make that take effect and then in order to get the audio
through on a Dacity we'll just open that up you go under edit in a Dacity is it edit or where is
it where's the preferences on a Dacity I've forgotten because I'm recording it may not allow me
to access preferences I think that's the problem and it is under edit I think where your preferences is
yeah it isn't it's it's grayed out I can't access it not while I'm recording but I'll just tell
you from memory if you go under the section where it asks you to to select your audio input device
and it'll have it all set it for pulse audio just go down under the microphone or the recording
device whatever and select from there the internal microphone hardware zero comma zero in in brackets
and you'll get access to your microphone and then you can record you can record audio using
either Google's built-in microphone which is what I'm using now or earbuds if you have them you
know some sort of Bluetooth device so let's start this recording back up again or the playback
was able to do that with a 25 gigabyte Linux partition and I think another 25 for Chrome
Chrome OS or something like that so it was a considerable size I mean not really I mean my
thumb drive is 64 128 gigabytes so you know there are there are there are it's a scale here but
20 gigs out of whatever it is 50 gigs 64 gigs whatever is on this computer is is pretty
respectable I thought so that's nice and then once you do that you you wait for it to sort of set
everything up and then it opens up a terminal for you and this terminal if I type in you name
dash AV tells me it's Linux penguin 5.4.74 that's what it is as of this recording and that's
kind of kind of cool so it is actually a Linux terminal if I do for instance sudo apt search I
don't know emax then I get I get the results of a sudo apt search emax so yeah this is it let
me do a cat slash Etsy star E L E A S I don't remember what it's release what is it OS release
something like that so this says it's Debian GNU Linux 10 Buster and yeah that's that's what I'm
running now now interestingly this isn't really this is it's not like this terminal has punched through
the the veneer of Chrome OS and is looking at the Linux layer underneath I I'm not this is not
Chrome OS in other words this is actually a Linux container running on Linux I feel like
that's a really surprising sort of layer of abstraction and I haven't been able to delve quite
deep enough yet into into how this is implemented to know whether this is for instance like a toolbox
on silver blue on fedora silver blue or if it's if it's a completely if it is a container a proper
container being managed by C groups or whether it's like a virtual machine that is being hypervisored
so I'm I'm not entirely sure what exactly I'm dealing with here and I haven't I haven't I have
not yet looked deep enough into it to understand the exact technology but it smacks of well one of
those because for instance if I if I go over to a browser and download food dot jpeg then food
dot jpeg appears in my downloads folder in my file manager here this is just the normal Chrome OS
file manager downloads but not in my Linux files so those are two separate partitions remember we
we had to create a separate partition for Linux or a separate container or something for Linux
and so I don't see the things in in from from Linux if I do an LS while I'm in my home directory
I don't see any files there and yet I know from clicking on my files in the little file manager
if I go to downloads there it is so it kind of it it it represents Linux in the file manager
as a different folder in your in your my files location file location but in reality it seems
to be more than that because you can also do things like you can right click on for instance
downloads and select share with Linux and then Linux can reach those files as well so there's
always this weird kind of unsettling awkward separation between your Linux side and your
Chrome OS side and I'm not exactly entirely sure why they didn't just sort of say okay well
if the user is created a Linux partition then we're going to simlink or whatever they need to do
tunnel or or or do a file share of some sort such that the Linux home directory is is your
my files or or maybe at least your Linux downloads directory is your downloads directory in
in Chrome OS I feel like that would be a more natural kind of connection between those two those
two paths whereas right now it seems like you just like at this extra thing that you have to do
I'm sure there's probably a command I would hope there there was a command to do this but right now
you can you can right click on the for instance downloads and tell it yes share with Linux
and then you can access those things from Linux or something like that it's awkward um but Linux
does run and it's more than just a Linux terminal it is a Linux terminal with apt for instance so
you can install uh like I say EMAX and then in your application menu within within Chrome OS your
application menu sees that you have installed EMAX and you now have EMAX available to you as an
application that you can launch and run within Chrome OS and you would be hard pressed to tell EMAX
apart from any other application on your Chrome OS I mean it it is exactly it it just it behaves
exactly the same way it is fully integrated into the system and I want to emphasize this point
for people who have maybe tried playing around with uh macOS and some of their you know the macOS
X-quarts integration which I shouldn't even say the word integration and the term X-quarts
in the same sentence if you've ever had to suffer through X-quarts you'll know that the
that the that the integration is just doesn't exist there's just not there is no integration there
I mean there is strictly speaking but but really it never feels like it it's a really it's it's
pretty poorly done not so with this this is surprisingly well integrated this this feels exactly
like the same system except it always goes back to that file system separation that's a little
bit weird so if you've got a text file that you've downloaded into your uh Chrome OS downloads
then when you open up your EMAX you're gonna have to work to get to that text file or more likely
you'll just drag that text file into your Linux directory and then we use it from there so there
is a weird invisible barrier there that that to a to a to a normal user must really feel strange why
why is that it must feel less like a barrier and just like really clunky clunky design like why
why do I have to put all my files in this folder called Linux files like I understand that
that's what I have to do in order to see my files but why why would they do it that way and the
answer is I don't actually if I wanted to use a Linux program to open something that's outside
of the links container I could open my file manager in Chrome OS and let's see if I have anything
in downloads I have a picture here and I can click on that and open my picture my squirrel okay
but let's say that I wanted to open it with something else other than gallery I could pick a Linux
app like here's image magic which I believe is one of the Linux apps and just click on that
and the Linux app will open from the Linux container here in a minute hopefully there it is
and you can see my little picture of the squirrel that's actually a Linux app that's opening data
from outside of the container now that doesn't work all the time with everything that you do for
instance if I go into my Linux files and I go in here where I keep my key pass xc password file
and I try to open up my master password and I right click on that and hit more actions I see that
key pass xc is not listed as one of the options so Google hasn't put up all of the options
on their file manager to open everything not yet so I would go into the command line on the console
I type key pass xc and then provide the path to my password file and it would open it that's
how I'd have to do it or do it from the key pass xc file open command or hit the file database open
and map myself over that way other problems I've seen with the Linux container courses I've
just mentioned you can't use simple screen recorder or OBS studio to capture your Chromebook desktop
from the Linux beta because there's no video access that I can I've figured out yet doesn't appear
to be any that's coming probably in 2021 sometime I would guess and I also had a problem
running the library app you know the Linux app of the debit the dev file that wouldn't run it all
from when I installed that in the Linux beta I also couldn't get the library flat pack to run
for some reason and I don't know why that is apparently there's something that it needs it's
probably related to SSL I guess that just isn't in the Linux beta that that particular application
needed and it's just not there not there to to use it won't run so there are a few smoothing points
left and it may never get to a point where it could run everything but on the bright side you know if
you wanted to run those kind of applications and not run the Android library app or just run
library from the the website you know you can access it from Chrome or Firefox have Firefox installed
on here both from the Android apps and also the Firefox flat pack from inside the Linux beta
I can access library that way so I mean I've got multiple ways to access library it seems like
you're just having to use different software to do different things until they get everything
working with the Linux beta but even if they do get everything working with the Linux beta someday
I may still be using the Android apps and otherwise to access things because they have their
cool features as well so again it's it's a hodgepodge and Linux beta is just that it's a beta
it's still in a development and it might be another couple years before they finish
smoothing that out to where everything you could do in Linux is really supported
but separated in a container from the rest of the operating system in Chromebook OS
I don't know why they would do it that way it seems really odd to me so I'm not really sure what
they're what they were thinking there and hopefully that'll get better eventually because I can
definitely see some really smooth avenues to just making that not be apparent to people you could
just say there's your downloads folder because once you're in your Chrome OS file manager you have
no sensation of a system of a file system like the file manager of Chrome is exactly what you
would imagine from a Google product it is a window with essentially what I assume are labels or tags
off to the left so if you want to find all of your image files you would click on images and whether
there in your downloads folder or in some other directory on your computer they show up there
but there's no sense really of folders and directories it's it's a big bucket where you put
all your stuff and and it it just feels odd to me that the one exemption to that is Linux files
so it may as well just be the same bucket as far as I can tell and no one would really understand
the difference there it would just look like the same bucket now once you're within a Linux app
the fact that you have directories or that you might have directories that's up to you because
you're creating the directories yourself but otherwise you're just throwing everything into that same
bucket and you can also create directories on your Google Drive all the directories that you want
but you know now that we're on the subject of creating directories I'm just curious
and I'll start at the file manager can I create a directory inside here and yes I can I can
make a new folder and call it anything dogs or whatever there I'll just call that one dogs
there I now have a dogs file folder next to my downloads Linux files and play files
and I could just go in there and create it and you know as far as Linux videos goes
and the images and audio and recent yeah those are all kind of quick starts let's see can I kill
my dogs file folder or delete it yep sure can so it's just like Linux it's just that they offer
they offer enhancements you know if you're looking for audio you can click on audio and it'll
help you find the audio quickly but you can create your own download folder whatever you want
for your movies music pictures whatever you want in here it's not really any different than any
other Linux operating system other than it has that enhancement which sort of freaked out clad to
you know that they would have a bucket called music or pictures or maybe images where you'll
only find pictures or images or music in those buckets and they could come from anywhere
so it's just different ways to prepare dinner here if you will you know there's more than one way to
to cook a roast I know why there'd be the separation okay anyway Linux it works exactly as you'd
expect that's all there is to say about that Linux is exactly what you would hope for it to be so
if you had purchased a Chromebook and you were nervous as you might be about sort of the functionality
of the thing you're just turning on Linux beta pretty much you've you've just sort of you've made up
the price of that computer it is now a fully functional computer with a couple of exceptions so
first of all Linux has that there is that separation between the Linux and the Chrome system so
you're going to have some problems with Linux programs that require access to ports that Chrome OS
otherwise dominates so for instance I tried recording this very episode on the Chromebook and to
my dismay it just wouldn't work I installed audacity a couple of different ways and tried to get
my sound into audacity could get sound out could not get sound in and what I finally sort of settled
on and I'm not overly pleased with the the answer but I think well you can use a dacity and I'm using
it right now and I've just explained that I'm not going to explain it again but yeah you can
you can do it by the way no matter what Chromebook OS or Chromebook you buy they're all going to be
using the same OS and they'll all work exactly the same way too which is another cool thing about
Chrome OS and Chromebooks is that no matter what Chromebook you buy the instructions I gave you
will work on any of them Aleneva and Acer the Google product itself Dell any of them you can run
audacity in the method I just described and they will all be supported whether you're trying to
record from the built-in microphone or you're trying to record from earbuds or anything else
it will all be supported in fact most external audio devices are Bluetooth that are supported
within Chrome OS and that is carried right into Linux with the Linux audio switch into the Linux
beta column think this is it it's just that that Chrome OS is grabbing for instance my USB headset
it's it's grabbing control over that before Linux has access to it no because it's all running
under pulse audio and I am recording audio to a program right here that is doing the video
at the same time this program that I'm I'm I'm leasing for a year is recording audio from the same
mic that audacity is recording audio from see audacity is making a recording I'm showing that on
my video they're recording at the same time and that's one of the capabilities of pulse audio
so um yeah you can record from multiple programs the same mic input
so I need some kind of USB pass-through option that I do not have at least at least not in
an obvious way I haven't looked very very deep into it but I've tried a lot of different things
I've tried interfacing through alza and through pulse and a bunch of other things and it's just
not working it's just the Linux itself is never seeing that device as an option so that that's
that's sort of it and that's another good point supported devices that will show up for Linux have
yet to be put in the Chrome OS you know for you to directly access them from the container
but they have these switches to where you can just ride in along with Chrome OS and grab whatever
you want in the way of audio right now so the audio problem is resolved we just need them to give
us access to the video so that we can make screencasts from the Chrome OS desktop okay we need that
otherwise if you're going to make a screencast for Chromebook right now my suggestion would be
to install KDE plasma in the Linux beta which you can do get that running
and or maybe you could install no there is an instructional tutorial on one of the Chromebook
videos on YouTube for how to install KDE plasma and you can make your desktop recording using
OBS studio right there within the container it's just that you won't be able to take pictures or
or make videos of what you're doing on your Chromebook OS desktop by the way the Chromebook OS desktop
is basically known three if you've noticed it's you know I I pushed this button here
I pushed this right here excuse me and this is absolutely that's Nome 3 you know so Chrome OS
desktop is Nome 3 they just need to get Nome 3 video access piped down to the Linux container
that's the final piece to that and then add a few fiddly bits here and there to make things like
the library application fully functional you know that you can download as a Debian package or
flat pack and they'll have everything man they'll they'll have it all I mean there will be a damn
thing that you can't do in a Chromebook that you could do and say Trisco OS or or Debian installed
on a regular laptop and on starter now if you're just looking you know there are ways to work
around those kinds of things like if if your aim is simply to record audio then you can use the
Android applications that you have access to to make up the difference but if you were looking
to use a specific Linux app and I was for instance I wanted audacity because I I know that as I talk
I need to edit myself so I'll I'll stop recording and and delete something that I wasn't sure about
or or delete some some stammery and suttery and so on so I wanted audacity specifically not just
some method of recording I could get some method of recording got that but specifically that
Linux app that was not that was not working now if there had been an audacity you know Android
edition or something then maybe that would that would work but but trying to use that feature of
Linux was not functional and I'm sure there are lots of other examples of that limitation so
that's something to be aware of but in terms of kind of the productivity side of of Linux and even
the development side it's just it's it's exactly what you would expect I've installed Lua I've I've
installed cute and I've I've compiled and run applications that are cute based I've written
Lewis scripts everything's just kind of working the way that one would expect it to work pretty much
watch out for the exceptions I wouldn't bank on it but I I would say overall the thing is is
functioning as I would expect it to function okay so you know really I'm surprised
that the Google development team didn't just go ahead and integrate in a Ubudo based container
aren't you instead of going with Debian of course if they did that then they'd have to be upgrading
along with Ubudo all the time and the snap packages and everything you know it does make you
wonder why they didn't maybe make a contract with Ubudo and just put Ubudo in on the Chromebook
doesn't that make you wonder I mean I realized the challenges might be a little greater
but in other cases though it might actually be easier for them to do it if they had a
Ubudo container rather than a Debian container not that I find anything wrong with Debian but
just as a joke I was thinking about installing Slack or 14.2 in a container down here just so that
I could say that I had it so that when I listen to the rest of the Good New World Order
podcast I could follow along as Clat 2 goes through various you know PDF readers and
doc book programs and all these things that he's been doing because it's interesting and I don't
think that you're going to find much of that in a Google Chromebook unless you're in the Linux
beta and Debian happens to have it but you know there you go in fact it'd be it'd be just as cool
if if they'd make a container that you could put any Linux operating system in suppose you wanted
to run open saucy that would be interesting but yeah it does make me wonder though why Google
didn't just shake hands with Ubudo and say okay hey we're gonna suck Ubudo desktop and in your OS
in our container are you cool with that and just you know make a deal and I think that would really
be very attractive to a lot of people considering how like 80% of the users out there either using
Linux Mint or Ubudo one or the other you know most of them so that's Linux and of course Linux
also has this new new thing called flat pack and that turns out to work really well as well so you
can install flat pack on it within your Linux terminal and then install flat packs from your Linux
environment and Chrome OS becomes aware of the flat packs that's right and here's my
here's my flat pack of Firefox OS or Firefox right here and it works I just set it up here an hour
or so ago and it'll be a little slow loading because you know we got a lot going on in the system
but let me see if I can just get it to we have so much going on in the computer right now I'm
sorry it's very slow anyway this is this is Firefox 83 I think it was here start me is just fixing
to come up hang on a second here boys and girls there we go and it plays videos and sounds great
through the speakers and everything it's it's wonderful what's version of Firefox is this by the way
help about Firefox I was thinking it's Firefox what 80 60 no it's 83 Firefox 83 right there let me
go ahead and shut that back down again anyway yeah I've got just all kinds of flat packs installed in
here you'd be surprised what you can get to run in it it comes right out you can put it right
on your start bar so you now have your Linux applications and your flat packs and your
Chrome OS applications all in the same loop and snaps if we had you booted by the way if they had
that option which I I would encourage them to do location looking like applications that may as
well have shipped with the computer it's it's kind of amazing to be honest and again everything
is working as expected outside of the the few exceptions of things that just collide I guess with
with Chrome OS's systems or or probably it's not that they collide it's just that it's being
dominated by the Chrome OS side and there's no pass through into that I guess virtual machine or
container or whatever it is okay so that's that's just the Linux beta side of things now you can go
a step farther and activate developer mode developer mode is really easy to activate it was trivial
to turn to to to turn on the problem was that well there is no problem the the thing about it is
that it erases your computer it's sort of like it re you know does some weird factory reset or
something and and it it activates the big fancy developer mode which isn't really that fancy but
it's it it activates the developer mode by erasing you know resetting your device essentially so
you have to go through the whole setup experience again so if you're going to do developer mode just
decide that early on or make sure all your stuff is backed up but of course you wouldn't have to
back anything up because you're living in the Google paradise but assuming all of those things are
are fine you turn on developer mode you reboot well you wait for it to reset you finally after a
long while you reboot and now your computer beeps really really loudly at you twice every time
you turn it on and that apparently is not something that you can deactivate outside of opening the
computer and I'd probably desoldering the little motherboard speaker or something it's and I'll
verify that is what it did because on the Acer the the Chromebook I bought from August of 2019 I
did that I went in developer mode and it does everything that he says and my assessment of developer
mode was it was basically a mess I didn't like it at all and Clancy is going to talk it up because he
he's looking more along the lines of freedom and security and I'll get into more about that when
when he finishes here because I have something to say about developer mode I'm not that crazy about
it but you know you're welcome to do what you want it's some very involved convoluted process that
I am not interested in attempting right now probably ever I'll just live with the beeps but boy
with those beeps be annoying I could see like if you were trying to get some late night computing done
or something and someone was asleep in the same room like that would be that would keep you from
turning your computer on it's just it's that loud you know the loud beep that I'm talking about the
the motherboard beep so there is that but once you have developer mode turned on you're free to
pretty much do whatever you want and it's pretty amazing so first of all the the most obvious
benefit of developer mode is that you can now ignore play store Google play store and use f
droid so if you are used to f droid I think it's what f dash droid dot org or something like that
if you if you've ever used yeah f dash droid dot org if you've ever used f droid on an android
phone or tablet then you'll be familiar with it it is a it's like a Google play store or a Linux
software repository before play stores existed and it has applications on it that are open source
now there are a couple exceptions there that you have to look out for some some applications are
you know that it's an open source client but the service that it's sort of tapping into isn't open
but f droid is really good about identifying those for you if you're if you're about to install
something that that's that they say sometimes encourages open source or or not encourages
you know closed proprietary technology or something like that then then it warns you so you know
very much what you're getting into pretty early on and it's really nice f droid dot org you should
check it out for your device your android device and then if you get a Chromebook or if you have one
turned developer a mode on and now you can install stuff from f droid so that is huge that's
um that's that's a whole other set of applications that you now have to and to add to your computing
environment and the f droid applications or the android applications whether you get them from
f droid or or Google play they work really really well there is a yet another caveat and that is
the file system thing again so android applications of course imagine a certain structure of
for its file system and so you have to kind of get used to speaking now in three different
senses of your file system there's the chromo-ass which is the really stupid simple one which is like
yeah dump it onto my computer and and then it just shows up in your file manager big bucket
model then there's the Linux version which is yeah put it in my Linux drive here in slash
home slash clat 2 and then good luck finding that from somewhere else well actually it's not that
hard because it's got Linux files right here so it points you to your Linux home in your file
manager the trickier one though and of course there's possibly the SD card so the SD card shows up
in your file manager if you have an external you know a card reader SD card slot whatever I put
that in shows up in my file manager and it also shows up as slash mnt slash chromo-ass slash
I think the name of the SD card in in Linux android applications sort of throw all of that out
and it I think in the android application mind there is the storage and then there's the I think
they call it the emulated storage and you have to kind of figure out well what is that on my
computer and it can be tough to figure out sometimes and and it they they they're pretty consistent
they really do insist that that's the truth like this is the file system and even if you're
if you know that's not the file system that's not what my system looks like to that android
application that it's exactly what your file system looks like and you get to save things in
certain places and then you get to go look for them later because it's really hard to navigate
file systems that don't actually exist after you've just saved it into a file system that something
insists exists so that's that there's a little bit of an oddity there again and again and I'm
not sure what he's getting into there but the base file system for Chromebook OS is butter the
BTRF BTR file system butter file system and you'll see that when you do a df dash capital T h in
your Linux environment you'll see that it'll mention that it's running on a better file system as
well so I'm not quite sure what he's referring to there at all I'm I'll have to I'd have to go
to development mode to to take a look at it and I'm not going to do that I've been there done that
and I've chosen not to pursue that because no matter how nice the after a collection is it seemed
to me when I was running it you could find every one of those things up on the place to or
anyway I just kind of do unfortunately I wonder what an quote unquote normal user every day user
what they would what they would make up that like it's got to be great that you can install
these Android apps but I at least the stuff that that is geared toward productivity I just don't see
like why you know when you you do a voice recording on simple voice recorder why does it end up
in a place called slash emulated storage slash simple voice recorder slash date dot in in
for air in p3 or whatever it records in and and not just in my files like how and how do you get
back there when you need it so yeah there's there's some there's some oddity with these these
other systems that you can kind of keep layering on to Chromo S but by my reckoning it's definitely
definitely worth it because Chromo S is pretty bare bones so these extra features well they're huge
I mean they make the the computer worth the money really so check that out you can only get again
afteroid only in developer mode that we will not work outside of developer mode you have to have a
developer mode turned on because otherwise it it wants to it insists upon seeing the Google play
certificate or signature digital signature so that's that's developer mode and like I say side
effect is that you get to hear too loud beeps every time you turn on your computer at least you do
on my device I don't know I've read elsewhere that it is on other devices as well so just be
aware of that all right so and finally finally finally the the the last one and this is the the big
one you could also just get rid of the OS entirely or or rather you can swap it out for something a
little bit more open source so it turns out and this is again probably not all that surprising to
many of you because you maybe you've done like five seconds of research which was more than I did
before purchasing the thing um but boy was this a relief when I found out that it was correct because
I suspected it I just didn't I didn't bother confirming because I knew that if I found out
that it was not possible that I would not then I would not purchase the device and I wanted to learn
the stupid trauma less thing and now I know it and I never have to look at it again so it turns out
that chroma s is based on open source an open source project called chromium OS so you know chromium
it's the open source version or the the open source foundation of chrome at the browser chromium
is is what chrome is based on so it is it is like fedora is to red hat or it is like maybe you could
say debian is to Ubuntu something like that um all of that seems a bit too harsh but but chromium
is the open source version of of chrome it's it's the open source stuff and then google takes chromium
puts their own logo on to it and puts their own google stuff into it and that becomes chrome so
just like that there is chromium OS there's this there's this project that is alive and maintained
and developed and it exists chrome takes it or google rather takes it puts their logo on it puts
their their their stuff their apps into it and all of their requirements and they ship it as
chrome OS so you can flash your device your chrome book with chromium OS and it is something that
you might have to fiddle around with a little bit but I have done it so you can go to chromium.googlesource.com
and there's documentation chromium OS docs and uh and they'll tell you also that if you use uh
and I think chromium OS also supports play store apps but if you end up using them you might be
in violation of google's terms of service this is a warning and they might terminate your account
lock you out of google so if you're using a google as your main service that might not be a good idea
just as a warning you know if you're not that tied to google then maybe you can but watch out
using any of the android apps they they explain the process for developers how to build chromium OS
how to flash it onto your computer and so on so if you're already in developer mode you're sort of
halfway there already you don't really need to do a whole lot more really you need that you need
to build chromium OS into an image and burn that to or you know dd that onto a usb device but in
terms of prepping the computer as long as you're in developer mode you you pretty much have everything
enabled that you need enabled there are there are lots of different variables because there are
different architectures the computer that it builds for the computers that it builds for are there
are a lot of board specific options and so on so it can be it can be a little daunting just to kind
of figure out what you're dealing with and then you don't really know what you what what you
what you're in for the first time you do it because you're in developer mode now you can
access a little known this very secret console that is available with a control alt f2 and there
aren't any f keys strictly speaking on a chromebook but there are keys along the top of the keyboard
with icons on them and so if you just count over there's escape and then there's f functionally
there's f1 2 3 4 and so on control alt f2 takes you to a console just like on a Linux computer and
you can log in with the username cron os and this is not recognizing that i have a divorce act
keyboard because when you switch over to this terminal they it doesn't recognize that but you log
in with this name cronos cronos ch ro in os cronos and no password required you just log in you can
set a password there's a command for that chrome chrome os dash set dev pass wd i have not done that
yet because this has just been installed the new chromium os this is a fresh image and and if you
set a password it gets erased later on you know when you're reinstalling so for now just know that
you can install you can log in no password cronos and you set the device to be bootable over usb which
typically is not set to be active and the way that you do that is you find the command it is
cross system cros system cros system cros system and what that does is if you do it with sudo at
least i don't know what happens if you don't do it with sudo probably doesn't show you anything
but sudo cross system and you might pipe it to less or something you do that and it shows you all
the active it's really sort of like cis ctl in fact i wonder if is that even do they have cis ctl
no they don't okay that's probably why so yeah it's very very much like cis ctl on another system
and so it has all of the these environment variables and one of the important variable one of the
the both this is a different one that we're looking at right now is one called dev underscore boot
underscore usb and it is set by default to zero so if you set that to one with a sudo cross
system dev underscore boot underscore usb equals one then now your developer mode is happy to to boot
from usb it might take a moment to sort of to update that variable so so be patient and then once
you're ready you can reboot your computer and hold down when you know you reboot or you power
down let's do it that way power down insert your usb drive into your usb port start your computer
and hold control you as you're booting and that just switches over to the usb drive and as long
as you flashed that image correctly onto that usb drive you're now booting off the usb drive you'll
know that you're booting off the usb drive because it instead of chrome on the on the splash screen
it says chromium and it uses the chromium logo instead of the chrome logo once you've booted to
the usb drive you can switch over to your virtual console again control all f2 and then issue the
command to install the from the image install that image onto your hard drive and that through
me for a loop here and there because so it's it's slash usr slash usb and slash chrome os dash
install is the is the command that's pretty straightforward but it it threw me off because
was asking for a destination and I hadn't thought about that because all the in the documentation
on chromium os it just sort of indicated that it would know that the the only part of that command
was usr has been chrome os dash install so it took me a moment to kind of figure out what that
destination ought to be and it ended up being a slash dev slash mmc blk zero which was the internal
sd card of of the chrome book that I have now whether this is true for all chrome books I have no idea
but it kind of harkens back to the triple e pc yet again where it was it was literally an internal
sd card and if I think it was I think it was like literally an internal sd card because I think I
added another one I think I got one that you could add another sd card to or something like that
I don't know um but yeah so it's it's like this slash dev slash mmc and of course at first I
thought well that's talking about my micro sd card that I added for extra storage uh surely surely
that's not where I want to install it too but yeah actually that is where I wanted to install it too
so after a couple of false starts I finally figured out where the the proper destination ought to
be set the dash dash dst for destination to slash dev slash mmc blk zero and let it let it install
now to be fair before I did that I didn't I didn't understand what I was doing and so I logged
into my into the usb the live system which is kind of it'll let you do that it'll let you set up
your sort of your system which I think once you install it just goes away anyway because then once
I rebooted I had to go through that step you know what a third time right once for chroma
as once for live usb and then once for the actual rebooted correct image so that was a little bit
weird um but but fine I mean it's not a problem just know that once you boot off of the usb you are
able to switch over to our virtual console and and get the thing installed there is no graphical
installer you're not gonna log in and then find a install the hard drive icon somewhere that's
not how this works you're just gonna go to your virtual console do your slash user slash usb and
slash chroma s dash install dash dash dst and set your destination wait for it to finish and once
it's finished you can reboot and rebooting was fun too I couldn't find them the reboot command to
save my life there's no telling it in this console there's no I think there was no reboot command
I ended up just doing a you slash usb and slash power off I think is what it was let me look really
quick usb and power off yeah that's what it was so anyway um you can do that and then you start
your computer back up again and remove your usb drive start your computer and then you're you're
booting into chromium OS you still have to suffer through those two loud motherboard beeps
but you're booting into chromium OS and now you're living in developer mode all you know is developer
mode and wow what a great experience that is because now you're not using any of the Google
proprietary stuff you're coasting off of a open source operating system on um a relatively
affordable computer with some really powerful tools at your disposal is it is it is it worth
doing this over just getting a laptop and putting Linux onto it no no it's not this really isn't
this isn't that there's no added benefit here that I can tell to to just having a Linux computer
and and frankly the way that this implements its Linux awareness is a is kind of weird and a
little bit crippling if what you're going to do with this is I don't know video editing or audio
recording or things like that actually maybe video editing would be okay I'm not sure because
um I mean unless you need to input sound uh but anyway the point point is yeah the Linux
aside of this is is a little bit a little bit wonky and the Android side of it is a little bit
wonky although less because it does integrate with the rest of the system but if you're looking for
for whatever reason a an affordable computer that that can you know that that sort of has a fallback
mode for I don't know stuff that people expect out there in the world like if you're going to a
school or something and they say that a Chromebook is an acceptable bring your own device uh device
well you can do that now but you can have a bunch of other things tacked onto it that that gives
you a lot more freedom than I think most people would expect to have with a Chromebook so my
overall impressions of a Chromebook are actually surprisingly quite good but that is bearing
you know I'd be curious to find out what his extra freedoms were but I bet you we could match
most of them anyway um but I tried the same thing on the Acer a year ago in September the month
after I bought it I started listening to Mintcast and uh actually I think I bought this thing two
years ago come to think about it because it was the other fellow was doing Mintcast at the time
and they were talking about converting a Chromebook over to Rentalynics Mint and I had performed
that procedure and everything was running fine but then I got to missing all of the Google features
you know from Chrome OS that that I enjoyed and uh at that time you know a couple years ago
Chromebook OS really was lacking enough stuff that you'd want to install Linux Mint or something else
um you know you just felt raped you know you got a bunch of new toys and features to play with but
you missed some of the stuff you used day to day on your normal Linux laptop that I I felt I needed
and so I was torn between the two environments and ended up just putting the Chrome OS back on
the Chromebook and leaving it that way and I'm glad I did because and actually I think it has been
two years it was probably August of 2018 when I bought the Acer because it's only got four more years
left on its contract according to Google you can look that up on how many more years your Chromebook
will be supported and mine that Acer expires in 2024 I believe whereas this pixel book expires in
2026 so I I can keep this and keep using it to 2026 so when when my Chromebook finally expires
the question is will I put Chromium OS on there or something else or will I just get rid of this
and buy modern hardware six years from now and continue running Chrome OS and I think the answer
to that is I'd probably just buy another laptop because when you run Chrome OS things like your Linux
container they're all encrypted so if your laptop is ever seized by somebody in an airport or
stolen or whatnot they can't decrypt it without the password and I don't know that Chromium OS does
that for you out of the box I don't know anything about it I know that you're probably not going to
get access to certain Google features but if you don't care about that that would be okay I think
the security would be lagging on it compared to what Google does with Chrome OS on a normal Chromebook
I would kind of worry about that and then of course as technological advancements happen
they're likely to become available year two before on a Chromebook then they will for you running
Chromium OS on an older laptop the final comment I'd like to make is that if there's anybody that's
going to port Chromebooks to the new M1 processor or any variant their app that Google might come
up with you know an ARM processor and this has been another sideline I've talked about previously
on hacker public radio on what we should do to get away from Intel obviously I bought another
Intel chip here because I'm running an i7 on this Chromebook and the acer Chromebook is a
pinium chip set by the way with four gigs of memory and believe it or not I can't tell the
difference in performance between the two systems when I'm running it in the normal way you'd run
a Chromebook where I can tell a difference is when I start running QMU and playing with Figuita
or similar operating system and the Linux beta then I really notice a difference between
this more modern pixel book go that I have with the i7 processor and the acer with the pinium
the acer with the pinium just gets outrun you know it's it can't keep up with that sort of stuff and
I won't be able to do the kind of video work that I'm doing right now and making an
audio podcast at the same time either I mean it just doesn't have the horsepower for it
but if there's anybody that's going to take a Linux to an ARM M1 like processor or whatever
Google might pick in the future six years from now for my replacement Chromebook Google do it
they have the resources to do it and hopefully chromium since they they use that as their base they
will you know be allowed to port over to it too it's just that I'm kind of worried that probably
a lot of the video drivers and stuff that they'll come up with under an ARM architecture which are
normally built into your AMD or Intel platforms now you know the the 3G accelerated graphics
might be proprietary of some kind and they might have some trouble warming their way around that
I know you've all heard about the new Apple M1s coming out so that'll be the next target for Google
and probably Windows as well you spec'd and then Linux will just fall in behind it however it can
and you know if there's going to be a port to Linux to get us on the M1 it's going to come through
Google and probably this Chromebook and Chrome UOS and that's what I have to say about that
so again I'm going to stay with Chrome OS on a normal pixel book because I'll get the most
advanced features first I have better security and I don't think that there's anything that you
could do on chromium with froid that I can't already somehow do on this pixel book and it might
be interesting to have a contest to see you know who can do what I suspect that I can do that much
if not more it just takes a little thought learning a new platform and learning what you can do
let's finish this up bring in mind that there it does take work to get to that point it's not
it isn't good off the shelf my impression of it off the shelf is it is professionally
implemented it looks like a computer that people can use and apparently people use it why I don't
know but with just a few extra options here and there I can see how it is a useful device and and
frankly it's it's it has been a useful device to me now for a good two weeks after after I
replaced Chrome OS with with Chromium OS in other words with with with all the Linux stuff and
and all the Android applications from froid it really is it is a completely useful system there are
days where I use the Chromebook the Chromium book exclusively like that's that's the entire computing
experience not days like this where I'm recording a podcast and I'm doing that on slackware because
this Chromium this yeah Chromium OS doesn't have the right tools for that so and mine does it's
available so I'm making a podcast for hacker public radio and recording a video which I'm
going to post a library and bit shoot when it when I'm done with it and I'm going to be able to
render my video in the cloud which you know if I've done a lot of videos in the last 20 years and
typically it'll take me a couple hours to render a video maybe longer three hours sometimes
if it's a long video I'll tell you the cloud resources that they have with the Google Chromebook
I can render a two-hour video in like 10 minutes I mean it's just nothing the brute force machinery
that they have sitting out there in the cloud it's it's between the display and everything else it's
it's like I am introduced to a whole new generation of laptops you know that the the world has
opened up once again for me and I take this thing even shopping with me I go grocery shopping
and I'll put my phone in my pocket and turn the Wi-Fi on and I'll use my Chromebook to help me
shop in look at prices while I buy groceries I literally am I'm walking down the aisle with a
cart and a Chromebook in the child seat asking Google about things it's it's amazing in fact if
they could just make this Chromebook do a sell call I probably get rid of my Android phone because
my Android phone compared to my Google Chromebook sucks you know have the GPS built into it and everything
to where I can make phone calls through say a Bluetooth headset I wouldn't even have a damn
Android phone wouldn't even use it at all and that's the reason they move some of the Android apps
over to Google Chrome because you know Chrome is their mainstay this is the mainstay for Google
which is again and I'll reiterate this one more time it surprises me that they didn't put a GPS
in the unit it really did it kind of angered me too but it surprises me there's not much you can
read about when you buy one but also a complete cell phone option where we can get our internet
data and also make phone calls from it that would be great you know in a future Chromebook I guess
since I don't see that it's possible in fact it seems to me I can get my chat messages my text
messages from my phone on my Chromebook I can do that right now they've already got integration
between the Nexus 9 that I have and the Chromebook so that I can use I can text and the Chromebook
communicates with some server out there that it has authorization to use my phone number to send
and receive text messages and pictures and things so they're just a hop skip and a jump away from
being able to make a phone call from the Chromebook of course we already have zoom you know
and we already have the Google video chat thing and YouTube and everything else already so I mean
all of that works right now on the Chromebook I mean you could use that if you wanted to get away
from Skype what have you okay yes there are huge exceptions there are caveats but I could
definitely see getting by on a Chromebook for an extended amount of time like really especially
if what you do works you know if you're a developer or if you are working primarily in a web browser
and just dip out now and again for that for the really good IDE that you love or whatever that's
completely functional that is exactly that is the sweet spot for this thing if I ever go to a
technical conference again and see a person with a Mac I think I will just tell them politely
that they should not ever get a Mac again and get a Chromebook because I mean the the price
difference is enormous and the functionality frankly is superior and you know I'm glad he said
that because he knows a hell of a lot more about Macintosh and Apple products than I ever will I've
never used one I've set in front of a Macintosh back in the late eighties my aunts and played with
it for a while and I've seen kids using Macbook errors I guess and they're blindingly fast you know
the graphics on those things are fast but this Google pixel pro go thing is just as fast
it is it's it's breathtaking and the color and the resolution of this screen is just breathtaking
it is it's it's almost as if I'm in Colorado or Wyoming wherever this picture was taken going
down a highway and my pickup truck if I as if I were there and of course everything is just
lightning fast in in a Chromebook world and I'm going to have to start learning to get more
integrated with the cloud as far as Google Drive goes and figure out what I'm going to do with it
right now I'm doing is video rendering and working with audio but you know eventually storing a
few files on there probably wouldn't hurt me a bit and maybe backing them up to the OpenBSD
server but I don't think I personally could ever get away with not having OpenBSD in my life in
a server you know I wouldn't trust it and that's where I currently store you know 99.9999
percent of my stuff is on that server so if I want to play a movie or something using VLC I can
just use SSHFuse file system bring up my server's volume and play that movie play that audio file
use library office to edit a document that you know are a spreadsheet that I'm maintaining out there
you know for some of my other activities and do what I need to do and in Classes right you can
just about buy anything you want to run on the Chromebook including even if you're into
Microsoft Office you know office products and what they do in the business world for Microsoft
Office and you know I've used Excel and all that in the past I'm not a huge fan of it but yeah
you can buy into that and basically use Microsoft Office I believe anywhere now not just Chromebook
so yeah everything is coming together it's the singularity I think they call it right that's
what the young people call it singularity what I call boomerollity maybe did I make a joke
integration with Linux is not perfect but it sure is a lot better than the integration between
X-quarts and macOS or cocoa whatever this is this is something this is a thing that you could get
it's also a thing that you don't have to get I mean it's it is by no means a requirement and
there's like I say the added value to Linux here is minimal and really once again what this is
a demonstration of is how a crippled system can be opened up with open source luckily at
least with the right Chromebook and I obviously this is based on exactly one but with the right
Chromebook the right options turned on you can replace the entire thing and have an open source
computer with a really interesting model of operation that can carry you through days and days
and days of computing and the battery life frankly is really amazing on this thing at least so far
I know that will fade over time but yeah it is it is pretty nice it takes a while to get there but
you can get there it's kind of fun getting there hacking around proprietary systems is deceptively
sort of satisfying you feel like certainly I mean the battery life on this Google pixel book
crow go excuse me is so good that I can charge it up overnight and I can walk around with this
folded up all day long and still have battery to go well into the evening when I get home I mean
it it's the only laptop I've ever had that's this battery efficient and powerful it's it's so
amazing and of course my phone will run the Wi-Fi on a charge for a full day I can just put it in my
pocket or shirt pocket or pants pocket and carry it right along with it and I've got internet
access and everything I need anywhere I go anywhere like you've done a really amazing thing when
you finally loaded all your open source applications on proprietary system but it's even better to
just get rid of the proprietary system entirely and with Chromium OS that's exactly what you can do
that's it I think that's everything I have to say about Chromebooks probably maybe in the future
I'll try to record an episode on this thing to see if it works but I I'm not going to promise it
because I do edit a lot as I go and without audacity that's a very that's a tough call don't go rush
out and get one thinking that I'm advertising that Chromebooks are amazing I'm advertising that
Chromium OS is a really important project something that can replace a crippled proprietary product
and make it really really useful but two Chrome OS's credit the integration of Android and Linux
applications is a big deal I'm really I'm glad that they've done that I think that they could
I hope they go farther with it and I hope that they really embrace this open source foundation
that they're basing their stuff on because it that's the part that makes this fun that's
what makes this cool and useful and I hope that they recognize that because honestly if there's
a person in your life who is stuck with a Chromebook these are the tools and tricks that can
transform them from a passive computer consumer to a productive and active and an invested
open source computer user thanks for listening I'll talk to you next time
well I'm going to go ahead and cut it off there and there is a difference in the mentality between
squirrels that live in a magical forest and aliens like clad 2 that do intergalactic travel
and stuff in that a they prefer open source projects over ones that are closed or entrapped
and be they prefer to write their direct their data on thumb drives and stuff like that
instead of really use the cloud even though we did mention that you know next cloud would be
an option for him it's probably hard to get an internet access while you're cruising across
the galaxy I think that's the difference between squirrels and aliens is that we're more cloud
oriented it's just that we're a little more selective on what kind of cloud I'm going to use
and for what and obviously more cloud options are better I suppose but I'd have to agree totally
with this young men's comment about how much better this is over MacBook even though I've not
owned a MacBook Air even touched one I know pound for pound it's lighter it's got a better
screen display it's faster and it certainly has a lot more cloud options I think that you would
than you would find you know a lot more capabilities than you would find in the MacBook maybe
maybe I'm wrong maybe someone will chew me out over that as far as capabilities goes but
I would certainly pick the the Chromebook over a Windows system any day you know
and there are a variety of Windows systems that are that are coming out as well that are I'm
singing doctors offices right now you know that the the the Windows mobile platforms all right
let's conclude this video with a final message from Google okay Google fart you can blame me if
you want I don't mind well you didn't fart for me okay Google fart it was me I farted it
definitely wasn't someone else in the room all you won't do it for me all right well we'll
conclude the the podcast then because Google's not cooperating maybe glad to his ride maybe we should
if we all ran that other operating system chromium then we could get our farts more reliably and
start our podcast from okay Google
we're Christ six where's the button to turn this off
and to the hacker public radio community thanks for listening
and yes you can record a hacker public radio broadcast on a Chromebook
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