Drivers Firmware

Most recently, it dawned on me that I have a few old ThinkPad T60 laptops kicking around that are getting a little long in the tooth.  Their meager Core2Duo CPUs coupled with a physical 3 GB memory limit has left them completely outclassed by modern computer hardware and unable to keep up with current software needs.  And yet low powered Android phones and Chromebooks are seeing an unprecedented rise to prominence despite the lack of power under the hood.  Why?  Because both micro-OSes are designed from the ground up to be able to run well on low powered hardware, in order to make them inexpensive vehicles for content consumption.  This stands in contrast to the conventional PC where a full fledged operating system, be it OSX, Windows or Linux is intended to be a platform for content content creation.  And yet, with the push towards cloud based software and services like Google Docs or Office 365, under powered devices like phones, tablets and Chromebooks are capable of leveraging the massive hardware power of enterprise class servers to do things like create documents, or perform Photoshop style editing to images using services like Google Photos in a way that is virtually seamless to the end user.

Ive been toying around with the idea of getting a Chromebook for a little while.  Their affordable price tag, exceptional portability and long lasting battery performance are certainly worth considering, but the lack of software available for them has always prevented me from taking the plunge.  And yet, the whole notion of an efficient, lightweight, always connected device that is "all Google, all the time" without the need for all the additional weight that a full fledged operating system brings piqued my interest as far back as 2010 when I heard about the relatively unknown Cr-48 pilot program.  Unfortunately, I was not one of the lucky few to receive a Cr-48, but that did not stop me.  Shortly thereafter, a clever hacker who goes by the handle "Hexxeh" started releasing periodic unofficial builds of ChromeOS in one of two forms: Flow, which was a modified version of ChromeOS designed to support most netbooks with common x86 hardware, and Vanilla which is more or less a direct port of upstream ChromeOS.  Hexxeh stopped his work on porting ChromeOS in 2013 when Google released the source code with official build instructions for Chromium OS.

Which brings us up to speed.  As of right this very moment, following the instructions found here I am completing a build of Chromium OS, which I intend to install over the Linux partition on this Thinkpad T60 on which I am building my ChromiumOS image.  A recent discovery that you could install an app called "ARC Welder" on ChromeOS which would allow you to install many Android apps on Chromebooks is what rekindled my interest in ChromeOS.  Im not opposed to the notion of ChromeOS, but in my experiences with it in the past, I found a "browser only" operating system to be far too limited for daily use, and the lack of software in the Chrome Store made the OS a poor choice for me.  But the ability to install Android apps on Chrome opens up a vast array of possibilities, even the ability overcome limitations placed on ChromeOS by its main competitor Microsoft, who have refused to port flagship offerings such as Office 365 and Skype to the Windows RT competitor.  It makes sense.  But Google finally has gotten their shit together and started making huge strides towards converging their two inexplicably separate mobile operating systems Android and Chrome.  I imagine that in the near future, the two will be so closely intertwined as to become indistinguishable from one another.

More on this in Pt. II