[lug] Jeffrey, please add me to your LinkedIn network

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2014-12-16 at 12:00 -0700, Jeffrey S. Haemer wrote:
> As another option, I use an Acer C720 chromebook ($199) for personal
> puttering. I'm content to use Google for things like
> email/calendar/hangouts, and various Amazon cloud services for
> mp3/streaming video/Kindle books/general shopping. A chromebook is
> tailor-made for this use case. 
> It's a browser-in-a-box.

It's actually pretty easy to convert this to a normal Linux distro.  You
have to open it, short a pin with a tiny piece of aluminum foil or
similar, then run some commands to reload the firmware (which is
Coreboot plus plugins).  After that you can install from a USB stick.  

I did this recently and installed Fedora 20 on it.  Works fine.  Mouse
pad is a bit finicky at times, but usable.  Note that you can't go back
to the original Chromebook if you do this, but I suppose you could get a
Chromebook distro and install it (if such as thing exists).

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org / http://www.graphics-muse.org
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His men would follow him anywhere, ... but only out of morbid curiosity.  
-- From a real employee performance evaluation.