<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span><br></span></div><div><br></div> <div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <font face="Arial" size="2"> <hr size="1"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">From:</span></b> Mike Miller <mbmiller+l@gmail.com><br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> [tclug-list] Chrome, Chromebooks, Linux and gcc, etc.<br> </font> </div><br>I endorsed this little internet reader for an elderly family member at Best Buy back in December and I've been watching from a distance to limit my involvement. They like it a lot, although the touch pad seems to flip off into new tabs for them without clear reason. They enjoy reading Project Gutenberg books on it and browsing. I thought it would be a good
choice for them as it's advertized as virus-protected by Google, but it also seems to come with a Gorilla-like Google presence for tracking and seems difficult to modify. <br><br>****I would be very interested to know if this particular Chromebook can be changed to something more open. A developer told me that early on there was a physical switch somewhere they could toggle to install whatever OS they wanted. I haven't checked into this and am not sure I want to mess with it.****<br><br>To my mind the Chromebook's main positives are its feather-weight build and instant on response when you open it. Battery life seems substantial with no fan or hdd. It seems like there's good forum support, but quite a number of user issues encountered. Things as basic as no delete key.<br><br>The Chromebook would not accept a Tomato- 54gl router even after playing around with settings, which I found a little disturbing. With factory firmware on a 54gl it accepted the
connection just fine. I've done nothing to test it for distance. ****If anyone knows why the Chromebook rejected Tomato, or cares to speculate, I would be all ears.****<br><br>Bruce<br> </div> </div> </div></body></html>