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HP Chromebook 11

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Re: HP Chromebook 11

#81

Post by nfoz »

joezydeco wrote: post #66
trsohmers wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed it is. This is a horrible time to buy this... Assuming Samsung's new Series 3 ARM Chromebook (Rumored Exynos 5420... "Eight core" CPU+Mali T628) keeps the same price this year ($250), then HP's model is left in the dust. No one should be buying a new Nexus 4, 10, or Chromebook until mid november if they want to have a cutting edge device.

Thanks for confirming. I'm a little boggled why HP would roll out an identical product an entire year after the fact, unless HP is just that messed up internally.

Do you remember the HP touchpad fiasco? :)

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#82

Post by tluyben2 »

Khao wrote: post #27
jl00080 wrote: post #9

serious work=>Laptop, casual work=>tablet, ? => chromebook

I have a chromebook at home and it has replaced my "serious" laptop almost entirely. Everything I do at home other than games can be done on the chromebook and it's so light and fast to boot I don't bother even opening a browser on my big laptop. Everything done in the browser gets done on my chromebook and only when I want to play games / use windows-only software do I boot up my other laptop.

Same here and I even do games on it :) I have the $249 Samsung; great machine.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#83

Post by sspiff »

aperture wrote: post #71
trsohmers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want an Intel chip in here? Would you rather get worse performance with half of the battery life? The only reason I can imagine is for installing linux and having the endless number of x86 precompiled applications. Even if that is the case, Ubuntu's ARM repositories have grown tremendously and ARM support is getting significantly better every kernel release. Plus, anything that isn't precompiled, you ca…

That's precisely it: for developing 32 bit applications. As it stands, I have many computers that could benefit from me programming a 32 bit application, but only my rpi could benefit (and my cell phone, I suppose) with the ARM builds. 32 bit is also helpful for me because I have some 32-bit IDE (like the naobot from Aldebaran IDE). It is simply easier for me to develop and configure.

Both Intel and ARM can work well in 32-bit, I don't see your point. On the contrary, if you're so hung up on the word size of your processor, ARM is a better fit than x86, since the latter is often running a 64-bit OS these days.

Are you mixing 32-bit and x86 in your comment?

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#84

Post by ZeroGravitas »

trsohmers wrote: post #50
joezydeco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exynos 5250 GAIA Application Processor Isn't this the same dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 that was in Samsung's Chromebook last year?

Indeed it is. This is a horrible time to buy this... Assuming Samsung's new Series 3 ARM Chromebook (Rumored Exynos 5420... "Eight core" CPU+Mali T628) keeps the same price this year ($250), then HP's model is left in the dust. No one should be buying a new Nexus 4, 10, or Chromebook until mid november if they want to have a cutting edge device.

A ChromeOS changelog from a Samsung employee referred to the Exynos 5420:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

"This adds Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling support for exynos5420 and this also adds the Adaptive supply volatge support for exynos5420."

Which points towards future devices using them.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#85

Post by tluyben2 »

pachydermic wrote: post #41
jl00080 wrote: post #9

serious work=>Laptop, casual work=>tablet, ? => chromebook

What about casual programming? Still kind of a sore spot for tablets - if I'm wrong, please tell me why! If I could just do simple emacs/bash stuff with perl/python/javascript/html and maybe even C/C++ I'd be a lot happier buying a tablet. Not really sure if you can do this with a chromebook either, though. Can it run a modern linux distro?

I run Crouton with Ubuntu Raring. Javascript/HTML/CSS dev you can even do under Chrome with some web IDE; the rest works fine under Crouton. There are just a few 'exotic' things you won't get working; for instance GHCi is broken on Raring ARM.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#86

Post by fidotron »

This thing being blatantly aimed at the education market, Google really need to do the unthinkable and let people host their own server backends to support these devices, otherwise they're simply data sucking machines. That their own educational programming environment runs on a RaspPi and can't be hosted on a Chromebook speaks volumes.

And I have a Chromebook, which I'll freely admit is brilliant for many things, but they're always going to be slightly useless until running server apps on them is supported out of the box.

The whole thing is remarkably similar to the model Acorn, Sun and Oracle were aiming for with the NC back in the 90s.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#87

Post by dataminded »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #65
dataminded wrote: post #60

Does '2GB (4x 4Gbit) DDR3 RAM' mean that it can grow to 16gb of ram? Under those conditions I would seriously consider getting it and running crouton.

bit vs Byte, 16Gbit = 2GB

Thanks. That missing y made all the difference. I will wait until I see what upgrades are possible before buying one.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#88

Post by trsohmers »

aperture wrote: post #71
trsohmers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want an Intel chip in here? Would you rather get worse performance with half of the battery life? The only reason I can imagine is for installing linux and having the endless number of x86 precompiled applications. Even if that is the case, Ubuntu's ARM repositories have grown tremendously and ARM support is getting significantly better every kernel release. Plus, anything that isn't precompiled, you ca…

That's precisely it: for developing 32 bit applications. As it stands, I have many computers that could benefit from me programming a 32 bit application, but only my rpi could benefit (and my cell phone, I suppose) with the ARM builds. 32 bit is also helpful for me because I have some 32-bit IDE (like the naobot from Aldebaran IDE). It is simply easier for me to develop and configure.

You want to develop 32 bit applications? Well I would imagine you would want to develop them for (and why not on) the most widely used 32 bit ISA out there... ARM. ARM has had a 32-bit ISA and hardware using it since 1995, and is now moving to 64-bit with Aarch64. Thankfully, they are doing it a hell of a lot better than how Intel managed the transition back in ~2004-2006 with x86-64, even though they are almost 10 years late to the party. But by all means ARM is 32 bit.

Obviously you meant x86 every time you said 32 bit in your reply. While it is pretty pointless to get into a religious war over processor architectures, I think it should be noted that the base compiling tools such as GCC and now more advanced/cutting edge ones like LLVM/Clang have started to give developers platform independence with cross compiling. As long as the libraries used have support for whatever you want to compile to (and almost all current packages and major libraries have ARM support), you can cross compile to x86 and vice versa. While I'm not a Stallman level FOSS advocate, I do love the fact that having as many open components to software allows this application portability to be a lot easier.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#89

Post by Touche »

zobzu wrote: post #52
alrs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google isn't a shining beacon of hope, but I do delight in seeing hurt put on closed ecosystems. The Apple app store is a flat-out threat to human freedom. I do not want to live in a world where the only software available is the software approved by Apple and the governments that have jurisdiction over it. edit: Note that I take no warmth in it being Google. Yes, they are closed. The good news is that HP just offere…

ChromeOS is pretty much closed. You don't have a say on what goes in, you don't have a say on what they're going to do with it, you don't have a say if they want to fully close most of it. In fact, you can only see the parts they let you see (in ChromiumOS), and that is the only difference with Apple or Microsoft (albeit arguyably, Apple also open sources it's kernel)

This is not true, there isn't much in ChromeOS that's not in ChromiumOS. You can file bugs on crbug.com and they are positive of most requests. And of course you can fork at any time; Chromium is developed in the open.

Re: HP Chromebook 11

#90

Post by lrizzo »

I really wish i could find a use for the chromebooks for my family, but i failed. This one seems similar to the samsung chromebook, which i tried for a while (also lending it to mother, sister, children) but we all found it basically useless for any everyday task.

Surely one can blame the ecosystem; but still the conclusion does not change, and as a comparison, tablets and phones had a more successful approach at adapting or modifying the ecosystem and become usable.

You cannot use an arm chromebook as laptop because of lack of storage, applications, limited options to connect peripherals (no drivers for anything except storage). No way to print that occasional document or boarding pass (unless you have another computer or perhaps network enabled printer); no way to scan a document. The samsung had an SD slot (this one does not); but you could not show videos from your camera because of unavailable codecs (and no way to install them, despite plenty of android apps for arm that play the same formats).

Casual browsing also fails a lot because of unsupported codecs (flash, silverlight); a lot of chrome extensions do not work for arm. Apps, almost non existing.

Compared to a tablet, you get a keyboard and the ability to display multiple windows on screen; but in exchange you lose almost every other sensor or peripheral (accelerometer, gps, camera, light) which make the device useful.

Now if there were at least a sandbox to run android apps, one could (temporarily ?) address the lack of applications.

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