Almost afraid to ask this. ;) But 1) Is it possible to dual boot a Chromebook into MS Windows. If anyone has done it, can you point at a URL of a recipe? 2) Is there a direct Windows equivalent to the Acer C720?
There's a well established community of people bringing full linux to Chromebooks in the form of Crouton and Crubuntu. I've seen people asking if you can dual boot chromebooks with a linux distro like Mint on a USB stick. So why not run or install a copy of windows on one? For the lulz if nothing else.
I'm also asking not just about the C720 but the other netbooks as well. It seems surprisingly difficult (by design) to just boot them off a USB stick. On generic laptops, with a generic BIOS, you just hit ESC, F12 or whatever while booting and get a list of installed devices to choose the boot device. On at least some Chromebooks, this isn't available, so you have to fool dev mode into loading the same kernel but then load a different linux.
As I've written elsewhere. ISTM that Chromebooks are NOT general purpose laptops pre-loaded with a Google OEM version of Chromium-OS. They are locked down laptops that are designed to ONLY run Chrome-OS. It's just about possible via dev mode to persuade them to run another Linux but with some limitations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Just trying to find out where the boundaries are.
But how about the second question. The C720 is a neat, state of the art, netbook with it's Haswell intel chip, USB 3.0, SSD, just about acceptable screen resolution. It should be available in at least three forms, Chromebook, Mint/Ubuntu, Windows. Is it, or something like it?
+Terry Green Chromium-OS is not Chrome-OS. Chrome on a windows (or mac or linux) PC is not a Chromebook/Chrome-OS.
And I've tried running Chromium-OS from a USB stick on $aBitOldLaptop and run into all kinds of problems. Chromium-OS is not a general purpose "rescue" USB live distro. It can't even work out what device it's trying to boot from. And if you get it to boot, getting Wifi, touchpad, sound etc to work is a bit of a lottery.
"Since I started ChrUbuntu back in December of 2010, it's always been necessary to utilize the Chrome OS Linux kernel with Ubuntu in order to solve some compatibility issues with the Chromebook architecture. That's changed with the Chromebook Pixel and the newer Haswell-based Chromebooks like the Acer C720 and HP Chromebook 14. Each of these models supports booting from a more traditional PC BIOS mode which makes it simple to use stock Ubuntu kernels on them."
That suggest that it IS possible to boot from a USB stick with a Live-CD distro on it. But only on the Pixel, C720 and HP14. And that there is a way of installing grub so $arbitrary_OS could be installed and easily run.
There's a well established community of people bringing full linux to Chromebooks in the form of Crouton and Crubuntu. I've seen people asking if you can dual boot chromebooks with a linux distro like Mint on a USB stick. So why not run or install a copy of windows on one? For the lulz if nothing else.
I'm also asking not just about the C720 but the other netbooks as well. It seems surprisingly difficult (by design) to just boot them off a USB stick. On generic laptops, with a generic BIOS, you just hit ESC, F12 or whatever while booting and get a list of installed devices to choose the boot device. On at least some Chromebooks, this isn't available, so you have to fool dev mode into loading the same kernel but then load a different linux.
As I've written elsewhere. ISTM that Chromebooks are NOT general purpose laptops pre-loaded with a Google OEM version of Chromium-OS. They are locked down laptops that are designed to ONLY run
Chrome-OS. It's just about possible via dev mode to persuade them to run another Linux but with some limitations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Just trying to find out where the boundaries are.
But how about the second question. The C720 is a neat, state of the art, netbook with it's Haswell intel chip, USB 3.0, SSD, just about acceptable screen resolution. It should be available in at least three forms, Chromebook, Mint/Ubuntu, Windows. Is it, or something like it?
And I've tried running Chromium-OS from a USB stick on $aBitOldLaptop and run into all kinds of problems. Chromium-OS is not a general purpose "rescue" USB live distro. It can't even work out what device it's trying to boot from. And if you get it to boot, getting Wifi, touchpad, sound etc to work is a bit of a lottery.
http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/chrubuntu-for-new-chromebooks-now-with.html
Interesting, especially that first paragraph:-
"Since I started ChrUbuntu back in December of 2010, it's always been necessary to utilize the Chrome OS Linux kernel with Ubuntu in order to solve some compatibility issues with the Chromebook architecture. That's changed with the Chromebook Pixel and the newer Haswell-based Chromebooks like the Acer C720 and HP Chromebook 14. Each of these models supports booting from a more traditional PC BIOS mode which makes it simple to use stock Ubuntu kernels on them."
That suggest that it IS possible to boot from a USB stick with a Live-CD distro on it. But only on the Pixel, C720 and HP14. And that there is a way of installing grub so $arbitrary_OS could be installed and easily run.