ChromeOS Drops Support For EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 File-Systems

[staalmannen]

I have noticed a similar strange thing on my android-based samsung smart TV that can take FAT formatted usb sticks but not ext4 ones.

In fact, I was hoping that the industry would move in the opposite direction - for example if Samsung made a F2FS driver for Windows and OSX and then shipped all its cameras,phones etc with f2fs instead of exfat.

[Luke]

Best fix is to treat Chromebooks as bare hardware for your favorite distro

From where I stand, this is just another reason why I would never use Chrome OS as installed but rather treat a Chromebook as a bare metal laptop sold free of the "windows tax." As far as I have heard they all remain ready to accept vanilla coreboot instead of Google's hacked version, then your favorite distro over it with no more need to boot in "developer mode" and wait 30 seconds.

Chrome OS could be hacked easily enough to support Linux formatted flash drives, by installing any other file manager such as caja, pcmanfm, Thunar, etc. Trouble is, that still leaves you with a vendor installed OS that can't be trusted not to phone home. It matters not the nature of such a distro, I would not trust my own OS if preinstalled by someone I did not also trust, as I would have no way to audit every last binary to ensure nothing had been added to it.

I never use cloud apps even on the weakest netbooks for privacy reasons, and I don't have the bandwidth at home to set up a remotely-accessable video editing station usable via ssh login with X forwarding. Such a concept would allow running kdenlive remotely from a tiny netbook, but would require the ability to move about 1 GB/minute in files over the network, I don't have anywhere near that kind of access and worst of all would need it on both ends. As for editing photos or audio, netbook and presumably Chromebooks as well have enough CPU power to do that locally. Hell a tablet probably has enough CPU to run GIMP and Audacity, I've usefully run those on Pentium II and even Pentium class machines.

[sunweb]

I think google needs it


"not enough manpower" and "statistics says noone needs it" sounds like political reasons.

[emblemparade]

To me, this was terrifying news.

But it's a wake up call: the fact is that the GPL is not enough. The modular nature of Linux has allowed Google to tailor it to their own quality requirements.

The problem with the GPL is that it's only about code. But we, the FOSS world, have no realy way to enforce protocols and standards. And this makes us extremely vulnerable.

[Sama Vim]

I'm waiting for Google to drop Chrome for Linux.

If you think back to when Google first released Chrome, it was exclusively for Windows for quite a while. Yes there's chromium but Google's disingenuous public statements regarding Chrome that Linux support wasn't a priority did sting a bit. That was even more notable since Mozilla and (at that time) Opera, both having much smaller development resources available, were releasing and actively supporting their own browsers for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

[rikkinho]

who cares?

chrome os is a OS for kids and stupid people

[Adarion]

Phoronix: ChromeOS Drops Support For EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 File-Systems

W.T.F.?!

Are these folks nuts?
1st: ext2/3/4 is okay
2nd: WTF? VFAT? NTFS?
Those aren't good file systems or / and they are patent encumbered!
In the end LOTs of companies ended up paying a BAZILLION Euros/Dollars to Mickeysoft because they had some VFAT support built in. Android anyone? Yes, some of these patents are likely obsolete, trivial and silly but anyway - that did not stop anybody from paying. Google is endagering everybody using this ChromeOS as well as it happened with Android. MS made more money from Android than WP. Damnit!

[jrdls]

Theodore Ts'o, the maintainer of the ext4 filesystem, works at google. Just sayin'...

[GreatEmerald]

And what about UDF? I'm using UDF for all my cross-OS storage needs, for instance.

[GraysonPeddie]

There is no mentioning of flash drives in the article, so I did react at first and when I read the thread, it all makes sense. Google wants to target Windows users who spent a lot of time in the cloud and get them to use Chromebook on-the-go when they don't need to be running Windows applications. I suppose I could mount a flash drive with ext4 partition manually as well, but I don't think it's meant to target Linux users; not even accessing SSH from a Chromebook by making a Linux terminal available to non-Linux users out there.

So my opinion for the article is it's sensationalism at best.