Anyone who runs Chromebooks knows that they have a roughly 5-year lifespan of
patches before Google stops patching them. Google has released an OS called
Google Chrome Flex that's meant for running ChromeOS on intel machines - but it
runs on EOL Chromebooks, too.
I had an old Chromebook lying around that I'd flashed the BIOS to SeaBios, an
open BIOS replacement that allows booting other OSes. That's the only tricky
prerequisite to Chrome OS Flex.
Once it loaded up, it looked and felt like a Chromebook. Everything works.
My Chromebook is a Lenovo Thinkpad X131e. an interesting little machine. It's a
little on the portly side compared to an ultrabook (it's hostname is CHONK) with
a nice keyboard, small trackpad and 11", 1366x768 screen. Intel Celeron 1.6 or
thereabouts dual core CPU, 8 GB of RAM (upgraded from 4). It came with a 16gb
MMC and no SATA drive, so I put in an SSD.
I've seen them selling for $30. It's a decent little Windows, Linux or ChromeOS
Flex system with a little tweaking.
When I put Windows on it, Lenovo had Expresscache drivers for it. Expresscache
uses the 16GB MMC as a big disk cache, works pretty nicely.
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