Older Chromebooks including the 3-year-old Chromebook Pixel won’t get Linux apps

News
By
published

Machines running Linux kernel 3.14 or older won’t be supported

Chromebook Pixel

Those of you who are looking forward to having Linux apps on your Chromebook may be in for a disappointment if you’re running an older machine, because a number of these more dated models won’t be able to support this functionality – including Google’s second-gen Chromebook Pixel from 2015.

Support for Linux apps in Chrome OS was announced back in May, but now it has emerged that several two or three-year-old Chromebooks won’t benefit from this.

Why not? Well, these devices are running an old version of the Linux kernel, and these older variants won’t be upgraded by Google to add the facilities necessary to be able to play nice with Linux apps – it would simply be too much work to get things functioning.

So the cut-off point for machines which will be upgraded has been officially marked as Linux kernel 3.14, or older, as spotted on Reddit.

Cold shoulder

That means Chromebooks using that version of the kernel or older are out in the cold, and that includes the following models:

  • AOpen Chromebase Mini (Feb 2017; tiger, veyron_pinky)
  • AOpen Chromebox Mini (Feb 2017; fievel, veyron_pinky)
  • ASUS Chromebook C201 (May 2015; speedy, veyron_pinky)
  • Acer C670 Chromebook 11 (Feb 2015; paine, auron)
  • Acer Chromebase 24 (Apr 2016; buddy, auron)
  • Acer Chromebook 15 (Apr 2015; yuna, auron)
  • Acer Chromebox CXI2 (May 2015; rikku, jecht)
  • Asus Chromebit CS10 (Nov 2015; mickey, veyron_pinky)
  • Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA (Jul 2015; minnie, veyron_pinky)
  • Asus Chromebox CN62 (Aug 2015; guado, jecht)
  • Dell Chromebook 13 7310 (Aug 2015; lulu, auron)
  • Google Chromebook Pixel (Mar 2015; samus)
  • Lenovo ThinkCentre Chromebook (May 2015; tidus, jecht)
  • Toshiba Chromebookk 2 (Sep 2015; gandof, auron)

There’s not much you can do if you own one of these machines – you’ll just have to resign yourself to not benefiting from Linux apps.

In other recent Chromebook news, we saw that Google is working on introducing support for dual-booting Chromebooks, offering users the choice of picking between Chrome OS and Windows 10 when they fire up their machine.

Of course, as well as bringing in support for Linux apps, Chrome OS devices are already capable of running Android apps.

Via Slashgear

TOPICS
Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).