

How to make your own Chromebook - mrseb
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385282,00.asp

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CurrentB
I hate to be negative, especially given how coveted CR-48s are/were, but after
about a week of getting mine I just had to put Ubuntu on it. Yeah, I spend 70%
of my time in the browser, but I just can't give up that other 30% (dev
stuff). It's not really worth having a laptop for me without a decent text
editor/full ssh capabilities.

It might serve the masses well, but my point is if you're the type of person
who would make your own you're probably better off not doing so.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
What are your ssh complaints? I've been able to ssh into another computer and
use vim and other cli tools without a problem, but I'm not an ssh power user
by any stretch.

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e1ven
Are you able to do this without Jailbreaking?

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tomlin
_and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better
hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering._

I think the low-ball hardware is very deliberate. If Google can prove this
level of hardware can work just fine for it's purpose, it disrupts the market
further. For $700+ you could definitely get better hardware than what is
available on the iPad or iPad 2, but you certainly pay more for that device,
don't you?

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dspillett
> and to top it off, you'll have a spare Windows 7 license that you can give
> to your mom

I'm pretty sure it won't work that way (legally). That license is very
unlikely to be transferable for use on any machine other than the one it was
bought with.

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PagingCraig
Yeah, even when you change motherboards your Win 7 stops working

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TeHCrAzY
That is very much false. I just installed a new motherboard, and I simply
needed to re-activate.

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dspillett
Windows is much better at this than it used to be. XP used to have hassle if
moving between single-CPU-single-core and anything else or vice-versa, or any
change that altered ACPI support, but Vista/7 cope better with such changes.
Getting XP to cope with a switch between SATA controllers is something of a
black-art (or so I'm told, I've never needed to try) especially pre SP3.
Moving between "specialist" controllers can still be "fun", but then again it
would be for any OS.

Linux has traditionally been easier to cope with when a complete hardware
change is seen by the OS, partly because most standard distros have kernels
with every common controller type compiled as a loadable module, partly
because it is easy to install the relevant modules before the change (if you
have the relevant knowledge, of course) and because it is easier to make
changes if it fails to boot post-change using a live CD of some sort - this
greater resilience to core hardware changes is probably what the previous
poster is alluding to, but for most (though still not quite as many) hardware
configurations commonly seen on home machines and work desktops/laptops modern
Windows variants survive the transition pretty well too.

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jrockway
I think the price difference _may_ be accountable for in the specs. Most of
today's netbooks come with spinning drives, and an SSD upgrade would cost
$50-$100 more.

~~~
mrseb
All things considered, I'm not sure whether an SSD is really necessary for an
OS that runs Web apps. Nice, for sure, but...

I wonder if there's a significant difference between HDD and SSD boot and
return-from-hibernate times.

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junkbit
Instant On really benefits from the fast sequential times and random cache
hits from the low latency/high IOPS. I would imagine there is a lot of paging
on a low memory machine.

The first generation macbook air users said that the SSD made up for the weak
CPU in day to day use.

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MatthewPhillips
Will they get the battery life? The boot time? If they can, I'd be interested
in going this route.

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mrseb
It should be comparable. It's hard to say, without putting two machines side
by side and seeing which one boots fastest/lasts the longest :)

If the hardware is the same, though, performance should be the same.

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jorangreef
There's no such word as "should".

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jamesgeck0
If there isn't, there should be.

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loumf
But then you don't get the 100MB "free" 3G data plan from Verizon.

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wslh
Best trying to do your Apple I

~~~
wslh
Any ironic comment receives an automatic downvote?

I can explain... I think that the Chromebook is a real shame, I remember in
the dot com era people making specific appliances and many of them have more
than a browser there.

The Google thinking is to me:

"if all you have is a browser, everything looks like html"

or

"if all you have html, everything looks like a browser" ?

~~~
wslh
Seems like punishment instead of logic.

