So cortex A15 has finally landed.. no mention of RAM or size of on-board SSD, i'm guessing 1-2GB and 8/16GB respectively (e: 2/16). Disappointing battery life ('over 6 hours', same as the x86 one), i guess the battery wasn't spared from the cost-cutting. Exynos 5 also means USB 3.
And do we know if you can definitely get linux on these (==interesting), or might they be super locked-down?
Definitely a device worth recommending to the former netbook/ 'only use my computer for facebook' crowd.
e: the battery is 2 cell, AFAIK even cheap x86 laptops come with 6-cell batteries, so it is a case of cost-minimizing.. shame, i'd lap this up with a 12-18hr battery life.
I've got one on preorder. I'm a gentoo dev in my spare time, and I definitely intend to get Gentoo running on it. I kind of have a leg up though since Chrome/ChromiumOS is built on Gentoo. In that regard, it already does run Linux, just their custom spin.
Now, here's a comment where I would think it makes sense to have karma visible. Because I suspect your comment should get some upvotes and that might influence OP's interest in doing a blog post, but we are also discouraged from "bump" comments. And instead, here I go, meta.
Well, actually, part of doing it IS documenting it so that others can enjoy Gentoo on their machine.
I normally do blog posts when I first get a machine, the unboxing and so forth, but documenting normally goes somewhere on the gentoo documentation site. Or possibly our new wiki.
And for the record when fun topics come up like ARM based hardware, or Linux stuff in general (I'm not much if a web guy, I prefer lower level work) I tend to visit the comments more than a couple times.
All ChromeOS devices to date have come with a "Developer Mode" hardware switch which turns off trusted boot and allows you to run your own OS / custom ChromeOS builds. I would bet this Chromebook is not locked down.
I thought they only allowed you to replace user space, not the Kernel?
I'm always so tempted by Chromebooks... All I want out of a laptop is no moving parts, < 12" screen, an 8+ hour battery, and 1080p video playback using my Linux distro of choice for under $300, but nobody delivers... Instead it's just endless parades of 'ultrabooks' that mysteriously cost $800+...
I could care less if the hard drive is 100 gigs or 16. But if you can't use your own Kernel I won't use it. Too much like buying a car with the hood welded shut.
But I guess for me a laptop is just the minor sibling of my desktop that's supposed to be good enough to watch movies while traveling and look up something on Wikipedia from the couch, and also be cheap enough that it doesn't have to last or not get stolen. In other words, not my main computer. But still have a keyboard.
I put a 40 GB SSD in my Cr-48, re-installed ChromeOS, then overwrote the BIOS, loaded Ubuntu, works fine. So long as they have an SD card slot, onboard memory shouldn't be a huge issue, but 16 GB is cramped.
If you don't want to dive _that_ deep, the developer switch still disables signature checking on kernels, so you can replace that one as well, but with their specialized bootloader, it's somewhat more difficult to get a system onto there than on a regular system (expectations on SSD partitioning etc)
(edit: clarified bootloader/firmware situation on ARM after finding appropriate link)
2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of SSD + 100 GB of SSD storage in Google Drive (for 2 years). The battery life does seem a bit strange. My guess is Google hasn't had enough time to optimize it as well as they did for Atom, which gives them pretty equal battery lives now, or they are using a smaller battery to cut costs, or Chromebook simply isn't as "ultra-mobile" as Android. But for a Chromebook, I think they need to increase that battery life somehow.
2 cell battery? Ouch. No wonder the battery life is surprisingly small for an ARM "laptop". My old netbook had 5 hours of battery life with a 6 cell battery, so they shouldn't have needed much more in battery capacity. 8h would've been "okay". 10-12h would've been hype-worthy. They definitely need to take this into account at least with future Chromebooks.
So cortex A15 has finally landed.. no mention of RAM or size of on-board SSD, i'm guessing 1-2GB and 8/16GB respectively (e: 2/16). Disappointing battery life ('over 6 hours', same as the x86 one), i guess the battery wasn't spared from the cost-cutting. Exynos 5 also means USB 3.
And do we know if you can definitely get linux on these (==interesting), or might they be super locked-down?
Definitely a device worth recommending to the former netbook/ 'only use my computer for facebook' crowd.
e: the battery is 2 cell, AFAIK even cheap x86 laptops come with 6-cell batteries, so it is a case of cost-minimizing.. shame, i'd lap this up with a 12-18hr battery life.