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Google is making it easier to turn any laptop into a Chromebook with Chromium OS

Chromebooks come with Google’s Chrome OS software pre-installed. But Google also maintains an open source version called Chromium OS that can theoretically be installed on just about any PC or Mac. The only catch is that it historically hasn’t been all that easy for casual computer users to install. But that’s about to change. Last […]

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Lilbits: Google acquires company that lets you turn Windows PCs into Chromebooks (and other recent tech news)

A company called Neverware has been offering software called CloudReady that lets you turn old computers into pseudo Chromebooks since 2015. But in order to do that, the company has been using software based on Chromium OS, the open source version of Chrome OS. Now Google has acquired the company and, among other things, that […]

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Latest Chromium OS build for the GPD Pocket 1 and 2 brings hardware, software fixes for these mini-laptops

The GPD Pocket and Pocket 2 are tiny laptops small enough to fold up and slide into (some) pockets… thus the name. With 7 inch touchscreen displays and QWERTY keyboards, they’re about as small as you can get while still supporting touch-typing on a laptop. GPD ships the Pocket mini-laptops with Windows 10 software, but […]

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Updated ChromiumOS builds turn GPD Pocket and Pocket 2 into tiny Chromebooks

Last year Keith Myers ported the open source version of Google’s Chrome OS so that it could run on the GPD Pocket and GPD Pocket 2 mini-laptops. But the software was a bit buggy at the time, with issues affecting audio, screen rotation, and other hardware. Now Myers is back with a new Chromium OS […]

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Chromebooks with discrete graphics could be on the way

While many Chromebooks are still basically small, cheap laptops with a browser-based operating system, we’ve seen a growing number of mid-range and premium models in recent years with the kind of processors, displays, RAM, and other specs you’d expect from a decent Windows notebook. One thing we haven’t seen yet? A Chromebook with discrete graphics. […]

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Lilbits 359: Google Pixel 4 “Coral” and “Flame” smartphones coming this year?

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Google will probably launch a new set of flagship smartphones sometime around October… although we may see the mid-range Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL much sooner than that. While we still don’t know very much about what the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL will look […]

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Maybe we’ll see AMD Chromebooks this year… or next year?

It’s been almost two years since evidence first showed up that computer makers and software developers were testing Chrome OS on hardware featuring AMD processors. Since then… nobody’s actually released an AMD-powered Chromebook. There are plenty of Chromebooks with Intel processors, and a handful with ARM-based chips from Rockchip or MediaTek. We may even see models […]

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Build your own Chrome/Linux operating system with Chromium OS and Crostini

Google is slowly starting to add support for running Linux applications on Chromebooks. But as I discovered when I tested Linux apps on the Acer Chromebook Tab 10 recently, it’s still a work in progress. The feature also isn’t available for all Chrome OS computers yet. That could change in the not-too-distant future. Right now you […]