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CafeTran on Chromebook anybody?

Just as a question (Hans asked it a time ago on Proz.com). 


As far as I understand, there is no Java and so no CafeTran on a standard Chromebook, but you might hack it and install a Ubuntu derivate (Chrubuntu). Most Chromebooks only have 2 or 4 GB RAM, not more.


Is this a viable, stable option, considering that 4 GB RAM is a kind of minimum for medium/bigger projects?

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This is an old topic, but I would like to share my experience since it might be useful to someone else one day.


I just bought a Lenovo Chromebook S330, with an ARM CPU, 4 Gb of RAM and 64 Gb of disk space.


I first tried Cortini. It was OK for simple tasks, but not enough for my regular working environment.


I then tried Crouton to get a full Linux distribution in ChromeOs development mode. It worked well (perfectly with Ubuntu, not so well with Debian), but some apps that I need on a daily basis are not ARM compatible, so I decided to try a third option: CRD (Chrome Remote Desktop).


I installed it on my main computer (Linux Mint Debian Edition), then on the Chromebook.


This third option was to good one. I now have full access to my main computer from the Chromebook. The screen resolution and reactivity are excellent (no latency problem until now).


To make sure that the latency was good outside of my LAN too, I made a test with my smartphone as an access point. It worked perfectly... even when connecting the Chromebook to my 32" external monitor, the image definition was quite good, surely well enough for translation work.

I monitored RDC with Conky, and it didn’t use much CPU on the main computer (which is not a powerful machine, just and old Intel NUC5i3RYH).

For the moment my Chromebook HDD is almost empty, since I don’t really need to put stuff in it. I just connect to my main computer and put the screen (Google Chrome tab) in full screen mode. That’s it, I’m then on my Intel NUC and can do my work as usual...

... so as long as I have an Internet connection. ;-)
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