Resurrecting a £50 computer with Vivaldi and ChromeOS Flex
The other day, I was pruning my inbox when I noticed an email from a company that I occasionally buy print cartridges from, IJT Direct, offering a reconditioned PC, with a new USB keyboard, mouse, wifi dongle, all for £50–including tax and delivery. Last year I upcycled an eBay Windows machine for my mum with ZorinOS and Vivaldi browser, so naturally, I had to get a £50 desktop, just to try it out and see if I could run Vivaldi.
The set arrived.
The computer is an SFF PC Pentium G4400 “up to 3.30GHz Processor” with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. Beautiful it is not. But, like me, it’s ugly and old, yet still capable of being useful.
I found myself an old VGA cable, and plugged it all in. It booted very fast, to something called ChromeOS Flex. ChromeOS Flex does not support Android apps, but it should support the Linux development environment. Of course, you have to sign in with a Google account, so I duly did, and after the OS updated itself, I went to Settings > About ChromeOS > Developers to set up Linux.
Yikes. The whole option was greyed-out. A bit of digging later, and I realised that the machines needed to be set up for Virtualisation in order to set up Linux. Was it? I would need to go to the BIOS to find out. Unfortunately, all tutorials told me that to go to the BIOS I needed to power up while pressing the Chromebook’s Refresh key–but this isn’t a Chromebook, so there was no refresh key.
Through trial and error (starting up while holding Esc) I entered the BIOS, mooched around until I saw “virtualisation” was off, turned it on, booted into ChromeOS Flex and, lo and behold! I was able to set up the Linux development environment.
Then, it was a simple matter of going grabbing the Debian-flavoured Vivaldi and installing it with Linux (which ChromeOS offered to do automatically):
And then Vivaldi is installed and available in the task bar, like any of ChromeOS’s pre-installed apps. You don’t have to do anything fancy, like start Linux and then start Vivaldi within that. It takes a few seconds to start after the machine is booted up; I assume this is because it has to boot up the Linux environment beforehand. If I quit Vivaldi, and restart it, it’s immediate.
It runs pretty well, considering it only has 4 GB of RAM. YouTube videos play properly (I wondered about codecs etc) and video conferencing is fine. The only thing that prevents Vivaldi being a “full citizen” is that ChromeOS doesn’t respect setting it as the default browser. I assumed this is because Linux is a sub-system (from the “Start button”, all Linux apps are displayed together in a folder called “Linux Apps”, while pre-installed ones are shown separately). However, when I installed LibreOffice with Linux and clicked a link in a document, the link still opened in Chrome.
It’s not the most elegant of machines, and isn’t portable, but it would do the trick for someone who wants a desktop rather than a laptop for civilian computer tasks: emails, YouTube, shopping, paying bills, social networking, writing the occasional documents (which is probably the majority of PC users).
And, for very little money, it’s prolonged the life of a perfectly usable machine and saved it from landfill. Hurrah.
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3 Responses to “ Resurrecting a £50 computer with Vivaldi and ChromeOS Flex ”
(Ok just noticed who is your employer 😅) I’m still curious; I’m a happy Vivaldi user essentially because the UX, but if there are any more nice features I’m not aware of I’d love to know about them.
One question: if Chrome OS is basically Chrome with some things around it, is there any advantage I’m not aware of about running a Vivaldi inside the Linux container of Chrome OS to run essentially another Chrome with some things around it? Does it run smoother or something like that?