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.
This website has seen an explosive amount of growth over the past year. There was a time that this website got between 10-15 unique daily visits but over the past year, that number has grown to between 150 and 300 unique daily visits and there are often days where the daily visits are in the thousands. I have been featured on several large websites including XDA-Developers, AndroidPolice, AboutChromebooks, BetaNews, Liliputing and countless Reddit/Social Media Posts.
Microsoft used to have a internal mantra known as “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” that helped to ensure that they always maintained market dominance. This was the driving force behind Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft’s Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, Microsoft Virtual PC and countless other products. This strategy essentially had Microsoft embracing promising new technologies and extending the features of the technology (often by adding exclusive features that work best on Windows) and then using their newfound market dominance to destroy the competing products. Aside from a few legal battles, this strategy often proved very successful for Microsoft however for some unknown reason, Microsoft decided to take a different approach with Google’s line of products – “Troll, Smear and Embrace”. I have compiled a list of my top 3 examples.
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.