Attention all ChromiumOS for GPD Pocket Users. There is a new update that is currently rolling out. This update is part of my efforts to bring the feature set of the GPD Pocket 2 to GPD Pocket 1 owners. The main feature that users will be excited for is that I have implemented audio support on the GPD Pocket 1! Here is a full list of changes:
It has been less than 48 hours since I released a preview build of ChromiumOS for the GPD Pocket 1 handheld and the responses have been overwhelming with a massive amount of positive feedback. I had a large number of readers request a build to be made for the GPD Pocket 2. I am proud to announce a updated release that will work with the GPD Pocket 1 AND GPD Pocket 2, all in the same image!. I have been testing this image on my new GPD Pocket 2 for the past few hours and I am very happy with the performance. If you are a GPD Pocket 1 owner, stay tuned as there will be more updates over the next 2 weeks.
I first announced that I have been working on a port of ChromiumOS for the GPD Pocket 1 ultra-portable computer back on March 9th. Unfortunately I have done a poor job with posting updates on the status of the build, that ends today with the first Public Tech Preview of ChromiumOS for the GPD Pocket 1.Technically this may be the worlds smallest Chromebook.
The Chrome team has just released the first Developer Build of ChomeOS 76 and it brings at least one welcomed change that eliminates the need to manually enable GPU support on Crostini. I am currently doing a teardown of the build to try to spot other changes and will update this post accordingly.
It has been a crazy year for those watching the rapid evolution of ChromeOS, in fact it has been a month since I first broke that ChromeOS had implemented proper USB support in Crostini 75.0.3759.4. Officially the Crostini USB support is limited to Android Phones, specifically to allow for developers to connect to adb on the phone to test applications on actual hardware however it is possible to pass support to many other devices by activating a hidden flag. There is a myriad of USB devices out there and this article provides a overview of what works and what does not work.
Over the past month, I have been researching Machine Learning and the insane amount of future possibilities that will result in the breakthroughs being made today. Projects like Keras and Tensorflow are pushing the boundaries on what computers are capable of and enabling just about anyone without a multi-million dollar server cluster to get into machine learning. I have built a simple setup script that will automate the process of setting up all of the tools needed to get started with Miniconda, TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch, OpenCV and more in a ChromeOS Crostini Container. Here is how to get started:
Google is currently pushing ChromeOS 75.0.3770.10 to users on the Dev channel. Software developers and Road Warriors all over will start to rejoice when they hear that Crostini containers will finally route connections through a VPN if active on your Chromebook.
The fact that it was not possible to route traffic on a Crostini container over a VPN has been one of the most annoying bugs for developers who wish to use their Chromebooks to work in a corporate environment. Google has been working on a fix since I reported it over a year ago. The community of Chromebook owners were saddened to report that the fix was pushed back to M76 about 2 weeks ago. It looks like Google is going to squeeze it into M75, specifically in build 12104.0.0 which may hit the developer channel any day now.
There was a time where Chromebooks were looked at as simplistic devices that are only good for visiting websites and to the credit to those old Chromebooks, they did their job well. These early Chromebooks lacked a large amount of local storage, often having between 16 and 32 GB of local storage, and between 2-4 GB of RAM. Chromebooks have since evolved to the point that they have the potential to be some of the most powerful laptops on the market but the only thing that has not evolved with the rest of the hardware is that Chromebooks still routinely ship with 32 GB of storage in 2019.
Heads up all ChromeOS users on the Dev channel, Google is currently rolling out ChromeOS 75.0.3761.0 to your devices. After performing a quick backup of Crostini, I took some time to install the update and find out what changed – it seems that it is not much. It is important to backup your “Downloads” folder as many items were deleted after the installation.