Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

[mendieta]

Are you kidding? It's completely open.

Someone even documented on Google+ right around the time that systems were introduced how to get a regular distro onto a Chromebook by booting from SD cards:

https://plus.google.com/109993695638...ts/b2fazijJppZ

I quoted those instructions earlier, and they are insanely complicated. There are two issues here: 1st. It is hard to dual boot on any chromebook device, and in part it has to do with the BIOS and ChromeOS security model. The second one is Samsung's fault: some of the kernel bits are binary blobs, so you'll see in these instructions that you need to manually copy a lot of binaries and hope for the best.

This is _not_ an open laptop on my book. I should be able to pop any OS on a USB drive and tell the BIOS to load it, and that does not work. Sure, it can be hacked, anything can be hacked/rooted/cracked. It doesn't mean it's "open".

In fairness to Google, ChromeOS is open source, but the model they follow is not open.

[jabbas]

Somebody wanted to compare this with E-450, so here it is: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...SU-1211219SU40

[asoltesz]

the interesting thing here is that given the previous lukewarm reception to chromebooks

both samsung and google had no idea this arm model would prove so popular

so they sold out and now have supply difficulties



also benchmarks don't show you the real picture of how it ACTUALLY runs ubuntu just how well the cpu performs...

unity without a decent gpu driver most be painful

I think the first thing after the Ubuntu install will be removing Unity and put on XFCE or Mate.

Unity would be way to slow for this hw.

[bug77]

I think the first thing after the Ubuntu install will be removing Unity and put on XFCE or Mate.

Unity would be way to slow for this hw.

If you wanted Xfce, I think you'd go for Xubuntu instead.

[curaga]

That apache result is a bit interesting. Anyone know why it does badly on A15?

[squirrl]

Using FBDev for it's graphics driver means you'll have a better Linux experience on a Matrox G200 equiped Xenon server from Dell.

[Pallidus]

that's the thing

like JS said in that thread where I asked people if they were buying it


as good as the arm cpu perfomance is


doing anything... ANYTHING like watching a html5 video with the chromebook


will bring your system to it's knees


DECENT GPU DRIVERS OR GTFO


and this is what I don't understand about linux, if chrome OS is linux

and chrome OS has the driver

why can't anyone "steal" the driver from chrome os to linux??

[JS987]

Chromebook needs following to be usable:
CPU ARM A57 quad core
RAM 4 GB
SSD 60 GB or more
open source 2D/3D graphics drivers with support for HW video decoding like VDPAU

[Tempestglen]

Somebody wanted to compare this with E-450, so here it is: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...SU-1211219SU40

Will ubuntu 13.04 final version improve exynos5250's performance?

You may test A15 on Ubuntu12.10.

[Pallidus]

that's asking too much JS

I believe it would be usable right now (after all it's faster than atom and atom's do run distros well)

all it would need is either a proprietary driver (google has it) or a oprn source mali gpu driver...


I sincerely doubt that samsung or google are going to deliver it so that's why I didn't buy one

but why should they care? they have sold so many you can't even find them anywhere


is this the future? a googlization of linux

android and chrome os

hey it's sorta, based on, kinda of, open source, and you can root it and hack it so it's better than nothing... right?