Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#31

Post by jemeshsu »

mtgx wrote: post #13
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9. Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5? Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!

It only has a 4,000 mAh (15 Whr) battery, smaller even than Nexus 7's 4,300 mAh battery, and considering it also has a much larger 12" screen (more than twice screen area), the battery life would also be smaller than Nexus 7. Nexus 10 has a 9,000 mAh battery, which is also used to compensate for the 2560x1600 resolution. iPad 3/4 has 11,500 mAh and it's pushing 1 million fewer pixels for comparison's sake. But I agre…

I hope Google will partner with ASUS for its next chromebook. Or even Lenovo. I had bad experience with Samsung hardware.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#32

Post by etherealG »

itry wrote: post #4

The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it. Is the A15 my future development machine? All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.

I think performance is still an issue. currently there are no gpu accelerated drivers if I understand correctly for non-chromeos linux, so until someone puts the effort into making that work.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#33

Post by kibwen »

Symmetry wrote: post #27
Too wrote: post #26

ARM processor running Ubuntu? What kind of applications can you run on that? (Genuine question)

Any kind of application you have the source code to, which is nearly everything in Ubuntu repositories.

With the caveats that the application must be written in a language whose compiler/interpreter seamlessly supports ARM, and whose dependencies all take ARM into account wherever architecture-specific code is necessary.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#34

Post by smackfu »

itry wrote: post #24
gabemart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue. Does that really bear out? I like the idea of a low-powered netbook connecting to a high-powered server for development, but in my (very limited) experience it's a pain. I have two machines, and old laptop with an AMD RM-70 and a Thinkpad X41 with a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz. On both machines, using Firefox is a painful experience because the per…

> Does that really bear out? Why wouldnt it? Been doing it for years now and cannot think of any other way of development anymore.

Depends on whether your use of Firefox is for Javascript or server-side scripting. Running heavy non-minified Javascript with caching disabled is much more pleasant on a fast machine.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#35

Post by gvb »

gsnedders wrote: post #23
WatchDog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a tear down: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-... The ram and nand is soldered to the board. It does have SD card expansion though.

Ah, that sucks then. Having done stuff with a BeagleBoard with everything on an SD card (even a class 10 one!) it's horrifically slow. Though perhaps with the OS on the built-in NAND and /home on an SD card would give not-horrific performance...

It has 16GB of on-board flash behind a flash/SATA interface chip, basically a 16GB SSD as parts on the board (more compact and cheaper than a replaceable 2.5" drive). That is plenty big for the OS, lots of programs, and your home directory as long as you don't go overboard with pictures and videos. Those should go "in the cloud" or on a SD card.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#36

Post by jsnell »

mtgx wrote: post #13
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9. Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5? Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!

It only has a 4,000 mAh (15 Whr) battery, smaller even than Nexus 7's 4,300 mAh battery, and considering it also has a much larger 12" screen (more than twice screen area), the battery life would also be smaller than Nexus 7. Nexus 10 has a 9,000 mAh battery, which is also used to compensate for the 2560x1600 resolution. iPad 3/4 has 11,500 mAh and it's pushing 1 million fewer pixels for comparison's sake. But I agre…

Please don't try to compare battery capacity by looking at just the current*time. That's an irrelevant number if the voltages aren't the same. The Chromebook has a 30Wh battery, which is twice the size of Nexus 7's.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#37

Post by jfb »

gsnedders wrote: post #23
WatchDog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a tear down: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-... The ram and nand is soldered to the board. It does have SD card expansion though.

Ah, that sucks then. Having done stuff with a BeagleBoard with everything on an SD card (even a class 10 one!) it's horrifically slow. Though perhaps with the OS on the built-in NAND and /home on an SD card would give not-horrific performance...

While it'd be nice to have it be fully upgradeable, I think the important thing to keep in mind here is $249.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#38

Post by itp »

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #22
saljam wrote: post #17

I got mine last week, and I've been using it as my main machine since then. I put on a small Debian-based chroot and installed Guacamole[1]*, so I can use my favourite editor and X11 programs within a Chrome tab. Compiling large C/C++ programs takes a while, but the Go compilers (what I mostly use) work really well. And I can always SSH into beefier machines (Linode/University) if I ever need to. This replaced a Thin…

Where did you learn how to set up the chroot jail? Any tricks necessary?

I haven't tried it myself, but http://technoticraccoon.com/post/27876540798/how-to-create-a... looks like it may be the way to go.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#39

Post by mark_l_watson »

I should be able to figure this out for myself, but I will ask anyway: is 16GB SSD really enough to support Ubuntu and a development environment?

At a minimum, I would need Ruby+JRuby+Clojure+editors an an IDE. I could probably live with just 4 or 5 extra GBs for project files and whatever my current writing project is.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#40

Post by codesuela »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #39

I should be able to figure this out for myself, but I will ask anyway: is 16GB SSD really enough to support Ubuntu and a development environment? At a minimum, I would need Ruby+JRuby+Clojure+editors an an IDE. I could probably live with just 4 or 5 extra GBs for project files and whatever my current writing project is.

Probably not unless you cloudsource your project files
Post reply on HN