Sometimes it is good to take a look at IRC channel in the evening. There will be new chromebook from Samsung. Someone may say “So what? It’s just yet another chromebook not worth looking at.” but I will disagree.
What is special in this device? Specification of course ;) Exynos5 Dual (5250) which has 2 Cortex-A15 cores, 2GB of memory, 16GB of eMMC (a bit small but 64GB sd cards exist) and all that in 11.6″ netbook case. There is no ARM device on a market which could be compared and run open source operating system.
I hope to get one soon — online stores will sell it on Monday. From what I know there will be a way to run other operating system than ChromeOS — I will switch to Ubuntu or Debian on first day probably.
And finally will replace Efika MX Smartbook.
Keep us up to date: sounds fascinating, but I’d want to run a “full” OS with LibreOffice et al. Has it got an SD card slot then? This is the first reference to one I’ve seen.
Yes, normal size SD slot on left side. I want Ubuntu 13.04 running on it ;)
I presume it has the developer switch on it. If so, then this would be a good platform for ARM Linux development work.
Yeah. Only problem is absence of super(windows)-key. That sucks in Ubuntu :)
No one forces you to use Unity ;)
Or run ccsm and set other key to be used instead of Meta.
just remap the chromebook search key to be the super key …I guess …
personally i would love to get the new chromebook … buy a bigger harddrive and install ubuntu as a dual boot … if you get one i would love to hear how ubuntu performs on it …
Engadget’s hands-on video shows it off quite well: http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/18/google-11-6-inch-arm-based-samsung-chromebook-hands-on/
Ubuntu on the SSD and user data on SD. Same performance – that’d be awesome. Would buy it straight away :-)
I am pretty excited about it too.
Any information about it’s boot process (u-boot?), will it be able to boot off of the SD?
And then – it has a uSIM slot which is not populated. Looks like the 3G version will be available later. So maybe it’s worth waiting a little bit.
In any case – A15 laptop in 2012, that’s one of the greatest ARM events of the year.
According to Olof Johansson there will be developer switch. He said:
More information about dev switch is on Chrome OS wiki: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-arm-chromebook
Looks good. And the price – £229.00. Not bad at all.
Looks like a google dev gave ubuntu a test run already.
http://liliputing.com/2012/10/samsungs-arm-powered-chromebook-can-run-ubuntu.html
Screen density/resolution is a bit disappointing cf. Galaxy S3 considering the processor is so much more powerful. But then the Galaxy s3 is twice the price… And I haven’t seen an Arm machine that can handle x with 3d effects (or maybe x can’t handle Arm) so maybe a conservative screen resolution is for the best.
I think that 1366×768 resolution was selected to keep price low. Mali T604 present in Exynos5 is able to handle 2560x1600px resolutions and handle 3D on it.
And there are few CPU lines in ARM world which can handle 3D in X11 without problems.
Nice. If you end up sticking Debian on could you make a post detailing this? I’m tempted to get one myself.
IF Chrome OS is already running on Ubuntu foundations as I read somewhere there might be surprisingly little work to install the repos you want…
OK, mine arrived today. Will play with Chrome OS over the weekend and then time for “upgrade” ;^)
Pointers welcome.
Read my Google+ posts – you will find all you need there already as I shared most of post from Olof Johansson.
Helpful as usual.
Thanks a lot Marcin.