Has anyone here tried a Chromebook?

[keith smith]

I think they have more value than just browsing the web.  I am a LAMP dev.  I use a cheap HP Laptop as my dev server.  It is not much better than this Chromebook and I'm using a HP Pavilion g6 (cheap and on sale) for my workstation - very bottom of the line.  

For instance, a fellow PLUG member was walking me through setting up a virtual machine.  He was using a netbook with the Intel chip that was prior to the Intel Atom N455 and he was beating me.  I am running an AMD A4-3300 running at 1.9GHtz and 4GB RAM.  I think his netbook was running at 1.3GHz and it probably had only 1GB RAM.  

I think these cheap Netbook are more powerful than they might seem. I would not use one if I were a designer because they might not have enough power.  However I find them to be very useful and they are cheap.  

I know they are way more powerful than my old broken down 11 year old laptop running a 1Ghz Celeron w/256MB RAM.  2 years ago I loaded CentOS on it and configured it to run as a mail server using Qmail Toaster.  It was only a test, however it ran just fine.  

I've been toying with configuring a Netbook as a public facing LAMP web server for testing. 

The Tucson Free Unix Group (TFUG) used a laptop for a couple years to serve their website.  Not for an active website, however it worked just find.  AND it served the mailing list.

For me the computer is waiting most of the time for me to type so these small cheap computers work well.  If I were compiling C or C++ all the time I would want something substantially faster, however I am not.     

Anyone else using Netbooks or cheap laptops in a production environment?     

------------------------

Keith Smith

--- On Mon, 1/14/13, Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Has anyone here tried a Chromebook?
To: "Main PLUG discussion list" <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>
Date: Monday, January 14, 2013, 12:02 PM

The Pros are its cost/performance. They generally run very well for what they do. The battery life is pretty good also.The cons you cannot fall back to Firefox for sites that will not allow chrome, and you are using a small net-book that is 100% purpose built to run just a browser.


Within that there are a number of tools giving you a great deal of functionality inside the chrome browser as a plugin. One of my favorites of these is an SSH client. they also have RDP and VNC clients as well. so in a pinch you can remote someplace and get something done..



On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 11:41 AM,  <joe at actionline.com> wrote:




Thanks for sharing this, Keith.

Seems like a Chromebook might be excellent for travel.

One can readily see some good "pros" ... what are the "cons"?



https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=chromebook_acer_c710&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-gdn-acer&utm_medium=ha





How superior is Intel Atom N455 dual core performance than Intel Celeron

dual core?



Seems like the Samsung Chromebook at $249 is better in a lot of ways.

Longer battery life and perhaps better construction.









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-- 
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Stephen


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