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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Chromebooks are one of the most secure devices you can give a non-technical end user, and at a price point few can argue with, but that security comes with a privacy trade off: you have to trust Google, which is part of the NSA's Prism programme, with your data in the cloud.
Even those who put their faith in the company's rusty "don't be evil" mantra may find Chromebook functionality limiting—if you want more than Google services, Netflix, some other Web apps, and maybe the Android app store, then you're out of luck.
Geeky users willing to engage in some entry-level hackery, however, can install Linux on their Chromebook and unleash the Power of Torvalds™.
[...] Trying out Crouton is easy, and worth an evening's tinkering. Enter developer mode on your Chromebook, which for most users means holding down the Esc and Refresh keys while tapping the power button. Doing so will erase all local data on your Chromebook (in the unlikely event that you have any locally stored data on a cloud-focused device, granted). Hit Ctrl-D, Enter, and wait five minutes or so for the Chromebook to wipe.
Once in developer mode, your Chromebook will offer a warning message every time you boot-up that the device is now vulnerable. David Schneider, the Crouton maintainer, who works for Google but was unable to get permission to speak to Ars for this article, outlines the security trade offs on the Crouton wiki:
"Dev mode out of the box does several things that compromise security, including disabling verified boot, enabling VT2 [terminal], and activating passwordless root shell access. This means even without Crouton, if you're in dev mode, someone can switch to VT2, log in as root and add a keylogger that runs at startup, then switch back without you knowing. If you're logged in, they can also access the unencrypted contents of your Chrome profile and copy it elsewhere. If an exploit to Chrome is found, verified boot will no longer protect you from persistent compromises. Essentially, dev mode by default is less physically secure than a standard laptop running Linux."
You've been warned. Once in dev mode, enter your Wi-Fi password and accept the EULA, then select "Browse as Guest." Head on over to Schneider's GitHub repo and download Crouton, and follow the instructions.
There are a few more seemingly straightforward steps detailed in the article. Thinking of those in the community who might like to give it a try, who here has already converted a Chromebook to run Linux? Was it worth it? What hardware did you have? What 'gotchas' did you run into?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday June 26 2017, @02:18PM (4 children)
Even if the application is intended to run offline? If you're riding public transit, and you're not paying hundreds of dollars per year to a cellular ISP for a second Internet connection in addition to the wired connection you use at home, you're offline.
Only very, very recently have the technologies come together to turn a native application into an offline web application. But each of those has practical problems as of the second quarter of 2017:
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 26 2017, @02:43PM (1 child)
I live in the USA so we have no bus, so that problem is solved. Instead of hours on bus and train for a commute I spend 20 minutes in car, listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I would imagine public transport is only a problem for a very small segment of the total population. Even if I had a mythical self driving car (which is more expensive than simply hiring a servant to drive my car) I would probably rather chill for 20 minutes than try to stress fully squeeze in a third of a billable hour. Crime rates are high and only poor people use the bus in the USA so if I whipped out a laptop on a bus it would probably just get stolen anyway, so that has to be budgeted for.
Google Fi allows tethering, no contract, I do the shared family plan for less on average, but a single dude its $30/month. If I spent "hours" on a bus each week at my usual billable rate then buying connectivity would be a rounding error. I don't have the quota to download multiple linux ISOs per day but then again a gig of SSH session is heck of a lot of typing and reading, so I'm good there. I've never actually used the tether, where I live the "free and open" wifi is still very popular.
You do have a serious point for students in a school bus, assuming they would actually work and not goof off or watch inappropriate youtube videos or whatever.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday June 27 2017, @02:33PM
Or half-donkeyed bus [fwcitilink.com] in my case. Or a school bus, as you acknowledged, especially with the push to market one Chromebook per child.
How much do loan repayment or lease, maintenance, fuel, and insurance cost you per month?
My experience differs.
That is, $360/year.
Is this true of an RDP, VNC, or X11 session as well? Or ought bus riders' use of the Internet to be limited to those use cases where text is sufficient?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 26 2017, @04:38PM (1 child)
If I wanted to get all picky, i could note that you spoke of paying hundreds "for a second Internet connection", and disregard the per-line costs (equally applicable to voice/SMS service), which are not "for" the internet, just a prerequisite -- but I won't. Prices in this post are the full price for a line and internet usage -- obviously you'll pay extra if you also use voice/SMS.
Ting: $6/month per line, $3/month for <100MB usage = $108 per year. I wouldn't call that "hundreds", though I suppose you could: 1.08 hundreds of dollars!
In fact you could use up to 1GB every month for just under $200, which is where I would start throwing the term hundreds around. Or, if your usage varies significantly, you could have <500MB or <100MB some months, and spend the savings going over 1GB others.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday June 27 2017, @02:55PM
Prepaid voice and SMS service on T-Mobile USA starts at $3 per month for 30 minutes per month. (I save long conversations for the landline at home.) The difference in price between what I currently pay and a T-Mobile prepaid plan including data does amount to "hundreds of dollars per year".
Ting's compatibility guide [ting.com] claims that any T-Mobile phone should work once it's unlocked. But based on unlock eligibility requirements [t-mobile.com], I have to stay on T-Mobile for a few more months before I can unlock my phone for use on Ting. Or is it more common to buy a new phone every time one switches carriers?
How much data does X11, VNC, or RDP use per hour for, say, a typical GUI app development work load? Others have suggested using such remote access technologies as a substitute to work around unavailability of particular applications for a walled garden device, such as unavailability of Visual Studio on Windows 10 S or unavailability of Xcode on iPad Pro.