On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 15:10:51 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 13:07:43 -0700 (PDT), Tim R
wrote:

On Tuesday, August 12, 2014 11:41:55 AM UTC-4, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Incidentally, for the laptop tightwads, the $130 laptop:

http://www.groupon.com/deals/gg-acer-116-chromebook-with-14ghz-dual-core-processor

I have several and they run Ubuntu 12.04LTS quite fast and fairly

nicely.

Interesting. No conventional hard drive, just a 16G solid state.

Most of my stuff is now in the (Google) cloud or one of half a dozen
cloud servers that I'm having difficulty tracking. Locally, its on
either a flash drive, USB 3,0 hard disk, NAS box, or various customer
servers. I don't need to carry everything I own with me.

I gave a talk on the install to the local Linux abuser group:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/FLUG-talk-2014-07-26/
It's just my noted and totally disorganized. Web page to follow if I
can find the time.

Do you find that a limitation? or just run an external?

The SSD is easily upgradeable:
http://www.androidcentral.com/how-upgrade-ssd-your-acer-c720-chromebook

With Ubuntu 12.04LTS 32 bit loaded, the "Disks" program shows a 14GB
partition (after subtracting 2.1 GB for the swap, and 2.1 GB for
something else I left on the drive. Out of the 14GB, I have about 7GB
free (after substracting out several 1GB movies). Yeah, a bit tight
after loading LibreOffice and a bunch of big CAD programs.

The 2GB RAM is amazing. I monitor the swap with "System Monitor". I
have to run a mess of programs before it even begins to swap. With a
SSD, I hardly notice any slowdown. 4GB would be better so that I can
run 64bit Ubuntu, but 2GB is adequate, especially at the price.

What impressed me most is how fast everything runs compared to my
assortment of other laptops. About 20 seconds to boot from a cold
start including the login and loading a bunch of drivers I added.
About 5 seconds to shutdown.

Oh wait, I just googled chromebook and realized most of the aps are
in the cloud.

I tried running ChromeOS for a while and learned to hate it. I
assumed that I could run Android apps, like on my Android tablet and
phone. Nope. ChromeOS is a differenet animal with very few useful
apps. There are now laptops that run Android, but I don't want to pay
the price. Besides, I like Linux better.
I have an older Asus laptop that was made to do graphics. The hard
drive it came with died so I put in an SSD and the 20 second boot time
from a cold start has been my experience too. However, I have been
told by some of my computer guru friends that the SSD will have a
shorter life than a regular hard drive because of the physics of the
way stuff is stored. There ways to minimize rewrites and so on to
lengthen the life of the drive and my son has implemented some of
these but I don't really know anything about it. I just love how much
faster the computer is now.
Eric