Chromebook -- wow?

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

So, as I'd mentioned, I've been enjoying my little quad-core ARM board. 
And when my wife and I decided my six-year-old should have her own 
computer (for games and even homework), I thought that would be the 
perfect thing -- except that it's an ARM.  So I set it up, and was 
rather pleased, until I tried to do Adobe Flash.  No-go.  The particular 
ARM variant (I don't remember the nomenclature) has no Flash client, and 
none is expected.  Since the vast majority of kids' sites require Flash, 
this was a show-stopper.  So we bit the bullet, and decided to get a 
laptop.  We both independently thought about the Chromebook -- the first 
time I'd seriously considered buying one.  But it's perfect for her: 
very unlikely to get viruses, does all the sites she needs, and don't 
need anything local to talk about.

We went with the Acer -- the Samsung looks a bit spiffier, and has an 
SSD for crazy fast boots, but 320 GB disk and a physical ethernet port 
pushed me over for the Acer.  It looked an awful lot like an old Acer 
I'd had that I'd finally given up on because I couldn't upgrade to more 
than 4 GB.  I seemed to recall hearing something about installing Ubuntu 
on the Chromebook, so I googled.

And wow!  You'll be violating your warranty, but for $200 and an hour's 
worth of your time, it looks like you can get a really nice Ubuntu 
laptop:
* 320 GB
* 2 GB RAM expandable to *16 GB* -- HOLY THE SMOKES  (two DIMM sockets)
* 11.6" screen
* 3 lbs. weight
* Dual-core 64-bit Celeron

The big caveats are that the RAM upgrade will void your warranty, and 
you have to go through some hoops[1] to do an install -- you have to put 
the machine into "developer mode," and, apparently, deal with a 
boot-time warning that slows down your boot process.  But for a system 
with those specs... well, I just might give it a go.

If anyone else has gone down this road, I'd be interested in hearing 
about the experience.

-Ken

1: The steps involved don't seem particularly arduous -- certainly not 
on par with rooting a phone.  The following are two sites that offer up 
a fair bit of detail; the second one is, I believe, the developer's 
site, itself, but I like the intro the first site gives.
* 
http://liliputing.com/2012/11/how-to-install-ubuntu-12-04-on-the-199-acer-c7-chromebook.html
* 
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-now-with-double-bits.html

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