
How schools around the country are turning dead PCs into speedy Chromebooks - nols
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/17/11030406/neverware-google-chromebook-chromium-os-education-microsoft
======
Animats
It's interesting that they did this with laptops.

The SF Bay Area has OTX West[1], which takes broken desktop computers and
swaps parts to make a smaller number of working computers, which they then
distribute to schools. Their new, modernized, mobile-friendly no-useful-
information site doesn't tell you much, but last year's site has a useful
FAQ.[2] As of 2015, they provided Windows 7 desktops with LibreOffice. They
have a deal with Microsoft which allows them to do OEM installs of Windows on
old Windows computers.

If you have old computers to unload, send them to OTX West in Oakland.

[1] [http://www.otxwest.org](http://www.otxwest.org) [2]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150226174001/http://www.otxwes...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150226174001/http://www.otxwest.org/faq.html)

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ochoseis
I actually mentor at one of the schools mentioned in the article (Academy for
Software Engineering in Manhattan). Really cool to see it featured here since
they incorporate CS into their curriculum throughout all four years of high-
school. If you're in the NYC area I would encourage you to check out iMentor
and get involved with the school... They're always looking for more mentors!

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flurpitude
I have an old netbook that came with Windows but runs Lubuntu now. Why the
excitement about Chrome OS compared to other resource-light Linux distros? I
can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the Chrome
OS software plus a bunch of other Linux software too?

I don't understand why Chrome OS is considered to be something revolutionary.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the
> Chrome OS software

No, Chrome on Linux does not include all features of Chrome OS. (At least,
IIRC, based on Google Chrome release blog posts with Chrome-OS-only features
identified.)

~~~
thescriptkiddie
Aside from proprietary codecs and DRM, what exactly does ChromeOS implement
that Chrome does not?

~~~
dkuntz2
Ease of use from an administration perspective. Google provides great tools
for admins to be able to manage fleets of chromebooks.

From your average user's perspective, it also generally looks nicer than lxde
and other lightweight DEs (though that's entirely subjective).

For technical users, there's probably not a good reason not to just use a
lightweight linux distro, but technical users aren't really their target
audience.

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hardwaresofton
Wish they would have used ubuntu desktop instead of chrome os, but glad to
hear people are doing this.

~~~
lrenaud
A friend of mine works in IT for district doing this. They have under a dozen
IT staff serving five k-12 schools. In the past he worked in a much larger
distinct with a Dell based laptop program.

One of the reasons they love the Chrome system rather than a more traditional
install (be it Linux or Windows), is when some clueless student comes in
saying: "it broken," the staff can wipe the device clean in a second. The
student can log back into the Google services to bring their account back, and
they minimize undue downtime to repair software problems created by the
students.

Could you get something similar going under an alternative distribution, sure,
but with this they're is no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining
the server systems and software.

~~~
antsar
> no labor/cost overhead associated with maintaining the server systems and
> software.

There sure is! It's just serviced by Google instead of you, and funded by your
students' data instead of money.

~~~
benten10
So sick of the knee-jerk 'paying by data' argument for EVERY.DAMN.THING.

Google does not do whatever analysis you're claiming on education accounts,
btw. Sure, they may be leveraging education accounts to get other 'paid'
contracts, but they. are. not. monetizing. student. data. While I am myself a
little bit of a cynic, sometimes it pays to tone down on the cynicism and see
things in a slightly more positive light.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Is there some agreement from Google not to analyse student computers or are
you assuming Google wouldn't stoop so low? Is it a general position for all
educational users?

~~~
nols
Here is Google's page on it:

[https://www.google.com/edu/trust](https://www.google.com/edu/trust)

~~~
Outdoorsman
And it states:

>>No. Google doesn’t assume ownership of any customer data in Google Apps for
Education core services, and it says so in our contracts (under “Intellectual
Property”).<<

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Claiming ownership of customer data would be way beyond any moral line it's
kinda crazy that the company that used to say "don't be evil" needs to say it.

The policy keeps saying things like:

>"Google Apps for Education services don't collect or use student data for
advertising purposes or to create ads profiles."

Just make me wonder, well if they're only promising not to use it for
advertising purposes then what use are they making of it; why isn't it just
"will not use student data for any purposes without express and explicit
permission"?

~~~
yincrash
There are a lot of uses that are benign or beneficial, such as indexing emails
for easier searching, etc but having to have an explicit permission prompt for
every one of those uses would severly hinder UX

~~~
antsar
It doesn't need to be a UX thing, just provide an itemized list of the ways in
which the data will be used on a page like the one linked.

They choose not to do this, arguably because they know what sort of reactions
that list would evoke.

------
gravypod
So are they basically just replacing windows with linux on a bunch of these
laptops?

It seems like that is where the biggest success came from: a linux install
with a lightweight DE.

~~~
paulmd
Being right up front: this article smells like an advertising piece. But,
taken at face value this desktop environment sounds like a good match because
it's both user-friendly and easy for their IT staff to manage, which is not a
trivial thing for Linux.

I've had good luck with lightweight Linux DEs too. I have a crappy Compaq
CQ56-115DX that I got from the NVIDIA chip settlement a couple years ago. It's
got 2GB of RAM and what amounts to a single-core Athlon 64 3200+. Win7
obviously ran like garbage, but a SSD and Lubuntu made it very usable for
basic productivity stuff. It was never fast, but it went from painful to
usable.

The problem is that Ye Olde Linux Desktop isn't something you could hand to a
random student and have them manage by themselves. Having a centralized
management system is a very relevant feature there.

~~~
rjzzleep
why not? my mom was using it. only reason i had to put her back on windows is
because of shitty silverlight drm, doesn't even work in a vm.

oh, and she's non technical and over 60. people commonly mistake the concept
of familiarity with usability. just like android isn't more unusable than ios.
it's completely different and it has 3 buttons.

~~~
dsp1234
_shitty silverlight drm, doesn 't even work in a vm._

I've had good success with pipelight[0], including DRM'd sites (Netflix, etc).
The biggest issue being user-agent sniffing (so I just set it as IE9 and leave
it).

[0] -
[http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html](http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html)

~~~
gravypod
I setup something like that for my laptop a while back. I ended up switching
to chrome, not chromium, as netflix supports HTML5 video streaming through it
instead of silverlight.

~~~
dsp1234
That's good for Netflix + html5, but doesn't help with every site (ex:
fox/cw/etc). So it probably isn't a good solution for 'Grandma' since she
probably wouldn't have the knowledge to understand why it breaks on non-html5
video sites. Whereas pipelight + user-agent works (currently) for a larger
number of sites.

~~~
seanp2k2
What's the resolution like with Pipelight vs Chrome HTML5? It was my previous
understanding that the bitrates and resolutions were limited running on any PC
platform. [http://www.technorms.com/42752/5-netflix-tips-hacks-you-
shou...](http://www.technorms.com/42752/5-netflix-tips-hacks-you-should-know)
has info on how to select bitrates via the "hidden" menu.

~~~
dsp1234
I get full HD bitrates through pipelight (looking at the hidden menu in
pipelight shows it at the highest bitrate). I'm not at my house right now, but
I think it's generally in the 3500kbps range (or some number in the 3k range
in whatever that menu shows). I don't know what the bitrate for Chrome HTML5
is since I don't use it.

------
wiseleo
They could do this for free by running Puppy Linux. I use it daily on my
10-year old laptop. It's Ubuntu-based and runs completely from RAM. My hard
drive inside this laptop is dead but it takes about 18 seconds to boot from a
USB2 flash drive.

~~~
type0
I had the same thought on this, Puppy linux is great

------
Outdoorsman
Inspiring story...

This is an excellent example of a startup finding a niche, with the added
bonus of providing a much-needed benefit to society...

Win/Win...kudos to Neverware!

Think I'll pull a couple of old Dell laptops out of my closet and rig them up
to give away to a couple of kids I know...

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philamonster
This is all great in theory but real-world application is so painful and does
not scale if it is anything more than a literal set it and forget it
deployment. I currently work in K12 and have looked into CloudReady for the
last 3-4 months. We abandoned it mainly because deployment was unbearable if
imaging or running around with a dozen USB sticks. If you choose to go the
managed device route you pay twice, once for the Neverware license which can
be transferred to another laptop if the original dies and once for a Google
console license which is non-transferable (for the type of license we
typically purchase). We are currently working on rolling our own district
specific Chromium deployment full with managed updates.

If you take away the money factor the sheer frustration of having to keep
polishing turds and putting 6-8 year old hardware out there can be
overwhelming whether it's as light as Chromium or still a bloated Windows
image that takes 3 hours to deploy with all the hacky crap that has to happen
to run outdated software. Keys come off, laptops get dropped, motherboards get
fried from being on & closed in a laptop cart for 5 years and first-gen mSata
SSD's fail. And then to do this with a staff of 6-10 people with varying
skills for thousands and thousands of devices in some cases.

Better off biting the bullet and buying proper Chromebooks for ~$300 and be
done with it. Windows is done in education as a standard. Lab environment,
sure. Office 365 will fill the role for learning the "essential" Office suite.
The kids are ready to move on. It's the adults making the curriculum and
trying to teach it that can't get beyond what they already know.

------
kylec
It seems weird to me that Google isn't distributing ChromeOS as an installable
OS. Isn't their goal to get everyone using Chrome, not to sell ChromeOS
hardware?

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keithpeter
From Linux you unpack the .bin file and dd it to a USB stick.

[https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/213346247-Cr...](https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/213346247-Create-an-Installer-USB-on-Linux)

Might have a play on the old Thinkpad X60. Wish them well with the pricing
model!

~~~
keithpeter
Well, that was easy.

Installed the 'home user' version on an X61s from March 2008 so an 8 year old
laptop. Listening to an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum mp3 from local storage
using the built in mp3 player (all sound buttons recognised). The X61s has an
Atheros wifi card and Intel graphics so not too exotic in terms of drivers.
1.5Gb RAM and a 64Gb SSD and quite responsive except on 'noisy' Web sites
where scrolling down the page will stutter now and again. I might be evil and
switch one of the cores off in the BIOS and pull a RAM stick out and see how
it goes.

You boot off the USB, you select language/keyboard and connect to wifi. Then
the Adobe Flash installer appears. After that you can log in with your Google
account and use the system as a live usb or choose to install to hard drive.

The latter option again asks for the language/keyboard stuff and then asks
about single or dual boot. I went for single boot so erase whole drive, then
you click next and you get a summary screen.Click 'next' and it is away - your
existing data gone and a happy bar in the form of three 'bubbles'. It powers
down when the install is finished. Rebooting you get the language/keyboard
thing again and then sign into the Google account.

Claiming just under 4 hours on the old 6 cell battery. Fan calm. Top shows
cpus bumbling along at around 5% or so playing this track with fairly 'calm'
Web sites loaded. Font rendition is nice as might be expected.

I might set up another Google account for specifically testing this thing out
on normal workloads. Might also try it on a Samsung NC10 netbook which has
trickier kernel driver requirements (Samsung extensions).

I think that the company would benefit from mentioning the ability to run a
live session off the USB stick without installing more prominently. They might
get more eyeballs that way.

------
skocznymroczny
I installed Chromium OS on my mom's old notebook. It's actually nice, works
very smoothly, practically everything out of the box and there are no bloated
settings, applications etc. to confuse her, she doesn't need more than Gmail,
Google and Google Hangouts anyway.

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twunde
Interesting to see how Neverware has changed over the years. If I remember
correctly their V2 product was about replacing old computers/laptops with
virtual machines running in the cloud. They have a new solution but they're
still solving the same problem.

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stcredzero
then/than

The Verge needs English classes.

