Running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS On The Acer C720 Chromebook

[Andrecorreia]

the problem??

the problem is not chrome, its your pc. only 2gb of ram today? really? i dont have such thing for many years. ram is cheap today,.. no point in buying a pc with only 2gb! i never buy such thing, its simply stupid, i buy a hp netbook last year and come with 4gb... my pc have 8, my mther 6 mt sister 8 my brother 16!... i dont see a pc with at least 4gb in my country (no chromebooks here)

[DanL]

RAM is soldered on,

*Facepalm*

[peppercats]

*Facepalm*

Not disagreeing, if it used standard msata SSDs and non-soldered RAM it would be amazing.

[mendieta]

Microsoft strong armed linux netbooks out by threatening the OEMs... and Windows netbooks were basically useless because windows was far too slow and bloated on an atom CPU and 1GB of ram. Classic Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish.

Exactly. I bought the first generation eeepc. Asus sold millions in a short time. And exactly as you said, MS bullied Asus and other manufacturers so that they effectively turned netbooks into useless windows machines, either underpowered for windows, or expensive for a net machine, which nobody wanted any more. And as you also suggest, only Google has the legal power to withstand MS and produce Linux mass products of two flavors: Android and ChromeOS. Hope they merge them already and kick MS out of business.

[curaga]

Why does nobody make such machines in that price range with slightly larger SSD (32 GB) or big but slower HDD and 4 GB RAM with Linux preinstalled? With some proper marketing they would sell like crazy.

They do, though not quite $200, but around $300. Not selling like hotcakes, I gather. (AMD Bobcat and now Kabini laptops, 320-640gb hd, 2-8gb ram)

[TheOnlyJoey]

Although I do agree that 4 (or at least 2)GB should be a new minimum for systems, 2GB is not unusable.
I even used a Raspberry Pi (512MB Ram) as a desktop for a couple of weeks to try it out, and even then i could open a couple of tabs in a browser while listening to music.

I think the Chromebooks are quite good "throwable" systems for daily use.
Given, you can't do all your Desktop crazy ass stuff with it, but for daily use? its really doable!

Currently i am on a old Toshiba with Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 900 @ 2.20GHz and 2GB of Ram and 8GB Swap.
I have 2 chromium instances open, one with 18 tabs, one with 6 (including 2 having HTML5 Youtube open, one playing 720p video's), XChat, Skype, 3 terminals, CodeBlocks with a large project and everything runs just fine.
The 8GB Swap helps a lot in this, but all the processes are quite overloading for this processor and is still manages.
I am really thinking about upgrading to this Chromebook, just for the GPU.

I agree. They only say Intel HD Graphics. I looked around and found something interesting: it seems like this Celeron is clocked a bit slower (200-1000Mhz vs 350-1200 in the HD 4600 found in core Haswells), but more importantly, it offers 10, instead of 20, execution units. So, the performance should be expected to be something like 40% of what a full Haswell would provide.

So basically a Passmark score of about 40% of the HD 4600 is a good measuring point? (256?)
That should mean raw performance it would beat the GeForce 9600M GS and the Radeon HD 4550 by a little.

[TheOnlyJoey]

Sorry about the double post but I just bit the bullet and bought one.
I am typing this from a C720 and getting the Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 Beta 1 image right now!

[mendieta]

Sorry about the double post but I just bit the bullet and bought one.
I am typing this from a C720 and getting the Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 Beta 1 image right now!

Congrats! Did you get the $200 model?

[TheOnlyJoey]

Congrats! Did you get the $200 model?

Yeah, the one without touchscreen, 2GB ram, 16GB SSD.
I installed just with SeaBios and straight install, although I did install some kernel patches from Chrubuntu (Haswell fixes, Trackpad etc).
Using Ubuntu 14.04 Gnome Edition Beta 1

http://www.reddit.com/r/chrubuntu/comments/1zo5yw/ubuntu_1404_patches_for_c720p/