Author Topic: Asus Chromebox  (Read 2470 times)

hans

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Asus Chromebox
« on: May 19, 2014, 05:55:52 PM »
So I picked up one of these this weekend to try and use as a new computer for my dad. The old Linux box went south on him and I'm trying to convince him to simply use the "cloud" for all of his stuff. For the most part that should be fine but he still does some stuff in OpenOffice (Libre) and has a large collection of song sheets that would need to be converted so I probably still need to give him part Linux. He also burns an occasional music CD from time to time.

For the most part I'm pretty impressed with the box. It does a good job pushing a 1080 screen and an Ubuntu instance within chroot works reasonably well. It could definitely use a bit more RAM (2G stock) and perhaps a slightly bigger SSD if you're going to use it more for Ubuntu purposes.

I haven't had much luck with the external optical drive being recognized in Ubuntu though. It will read content fine but doesn't show up for burning as an option. I have another older one I'm going to try tonight and see if it's a hardware thing or not.

Also, I'm pondering getting an 8G RAM kit (4G is probably plenty though) but I have some old 1333 chips that I could use from my netbook and I'm wondering if I'd really need to go up to 1600 or not. It won't be for gaming or anything and super speed isn't really the top priority. Save the money and throw in the 1333 (it's CL9 vs the CL11 I'd probably end up getting with the 1600)? And we're trying to do this as cheaply as possible.
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hans

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Re: Asus Chromebox
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2014, 01:54:50 AM »
Well I got the burner kind of working. I think it's related to permissions on the system. If I chmod the device mount it seems to work but ejecting the device causes the permissions to get reset and things get wonky. I think I may need to add an entry in fstab or something. Otherwise it seems like this might actually work for my dad without having to build a full Linux only system.
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