What kind of development can you do with an old $50 Chromebook? (ASUS C100P)

Model: C100PA-DB02

CPU: ARMv7 Rockchip 1.8GHz quadcore
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 16GB eMMC

TL;DR

Not really usable for development (lol).

While you can develop with it, the lag is prohibitive. This is in the context of ReactJS/ElectronJS/Node in my case. You do npm install and wait like 10 minutes or more. Yeah it’s been like 30 minutes and it’s still not done oh man… this reify:rxjs

Background

Idk why I bought this thing. It’s nostalgia… 2015 or so I saw this laptop and liked the design, it was new then. It’s a good design, metal body, flip over display and small. Of course I did a post like this before but it was with a Toshiba Chromebook 2. I ended up selling it.

What will I do with this computer? (not really anything it turns out). Nothing heavy anyway. Will take a bit for me to figure out what to do with it.

Initial impressions

It’s small. I’ve been using 14"+ devices for a while so it’s really tiny comparatively. The bevels are massive on the side. It does have external HDMI out but I don’t have one of these tiny display port to HDMI adapters handy. I opened YouTube and it took a few seconds for it to render (oof). But it does work…

It puts Linux on or it gets the hose again

This took me a bit. I tried to use this Arch Linux ARM guide which got me to the point of getting into developer mode/booting from an external storage. However the Arch boot process gets stuck, it gets stuck on Network Configuration/RF kill switch. So I decided to try some other things… originally I wanted “pure Linux” as in completely wipe the eMMC “because it’s faster” although the 16GB size sucks. I could not get ISOs to either burn (balena etcher would fail on Debian ARM isos) or the ones that did like Ubuntu Focal would not work… I don’t know if I had the right ARM or not eg. armhf vs. arm64. On one thing I tried it said intel only not ARM. Anyway I ended up just using crouton. I used various guides (tried anything I could find till I got something to work), I’ll post em below. But eventually I did get it to work, I’m using Ubuntu Xenial with XFCE. I did get neofetch on their (of course).

Battery

The battery is great. I’m pleased to say. It says 89% capacity which I don’t know if that’s faked eeprom but from a usage standpoint I have been messing around with it for a day and a half and it has not needed to be charged (was still around 40% left). So this is great… I might have just gotten lucky but that’s the one thing that sucks about buying old laptops is the battery is probably bad and the replacements are usually fake.

Doing some work

I really don’t want to do any work on this right now (working on other projects). So I’ll just do something basic. I will pull down the CPA I made with Electron and see if I can compile it for this environment.

This screen is extremely small lol… like websites you see a small corner of it. But I’m still down, I really like how tiny it is and portable.

In general there’s like a 3s+ lag when doing stuff, particularly in the browser. This isn’t a matter of internet, I have fiber. It’s just processing the page takes longer.

Yeah this failed… I can’t even complete an npm install without something failing. And as mentioned it takes so long.

I’ll screw around with this more but I think if I’m going to develop anything on it, it has to be light/performant.

Thinking more about it… maybe it’s the SD card that’s why it’s so slow… doesn’t really make sense though. It’s a good quality card (150 MB/s Sandisk ultra) and on a Raspberry Pi that can run like anything, uses same card. So I think it is just a matter of processing power. I’ll have to check/compare CPUs and see.

Few days later thoughts

I don’t mind having this thing. It has a long battery life. It’s small so I can bring it to a work bench and ssh into some pi robot and do stuff. And mostly yeah I like the build of it.

Resources

ArchLinuxARM (ALARM) setup that failed to boot
Crouton XFCE install (I just used sudo crouton -t xfce)
info on moving chroot to external drive can verify with df -h / (bigger size)
neofetch on Ubuntu 16, I used this ppa, guy apparently works for Nokia so I’m like alright I trust it