________________________________ From: Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> Subject: [tclug-list] Chrome, Chromebooks, Linux and gcc, etc. I endorsed this little internet reader for an elderly family member at Best Buy back in December and I've been watching from a distance to limit my involvement. They like it a lot, although the touch pad seems to flip off into new tabs for them without clear reason. They enjoy reading Project Gutenberg books on it and browsing. I thought it would be a good choice for them as it's advertized as virus-protected by Google, but it also seems to come with a Gorilla-like Google presence for tracking and seems difficult to modify. ****I would be very interested to know if this particular Chromebook can be changed to something more open. A developer told me that early on there was a physical switch somewhere they could toggle to install whatever OS they wanted. I haven't checked into this and am not sure I want to mess with it.**** To my mind the Chromebook's main positives are its feather-weight build and instant on response when you open it. Battery life seems substantial with no fan or hdd. It seems like there's good forum support, but quite a number of user issues encountered. Things as basic as no delete key. The Chromebook would not accept a Tomato- 54gl router even after playing around with settings, which I found a little disturbing. With factory firmware on a 54gl it accepted the connection just fine. I've done nothing to test it for distance. ****If anyone knows why the Chromebook rejected Tomato, or cares to speculate, I would be all ears.**** Bruce -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130112/b79be83f/attachment.html>