 We are recording perfect No pressure the Any mistakes will be saved for posterity at this point and that's good to be plenty So the agenda for tonight is but Lee is going to Very briefly cover kind of what Chromeflex is And why it can be useful We're then gonna look at the installation process for Chrome OS flex And we can have some discussion and answer some questions during that process And then finally we'll have a session at the end just exploring flex once it's up and running to explore its capabilities its limitations And then answer any further questions you have at that stage before finishing up Going to share the recording afterwards. Yes, we'll share the recording afterwards. Yes Initially via the forum Okay, so without further ado, I'll hand over to Lee who is you had earlier is the proud owner of a PC Repair shop I believe he's presenting this evening. Hence the various computer paraphernalia in the background. This is my front room Right as well as the kind of right articles for PC pro and Bit questions, so we're really lucky to have a lead with us tonight Take it away. Thank you. Thank you. You may not say that by the end of this, but we'll get on to that later So, anyway, thank you very much for turning out on a on a Thursday evening to come and listen to me waffle on It really is very nice to see some new faces So Chrome OS flex, I've been playing with this for a few weeks now and I was really intrigued by What it is really and and and why it's suddenly out at this point in time now Some of you have mentioned the cloud ready stuff So we've mentioned Linux and obviously doing what I do day to day I see all sorts of frankly steaming wrecks of computers that you know have long been Sort of past their useful windows date because as windows Updates as we know and it progresses. It just seems to get a bit a bit slower I many years ago. I wrote that windows 10 was a bit like Elvis Presley and when it launched because I felt they put quite a lot of development to the launch of windows 10 like soft It was like a Elvis Presley in a leather jacket sort of thrusting its hips and it was quite live and now it's updated It's now very much into the vagus jumpsuit era of The Elvis Presley man and it's not quite as slim and live as it used to be and it really as most of you know because You sound like we all have similar experiences Making low powered hardware. It makes it really sweat and that's why Actually, I just happened to have these here. I spend most of my days Changing hard drives for ssd's and those things, you know, I'm absolutely perceived by this mainly due to The lethargy of windows. So chroma sx flex is a really interesting sort of proposition And I've been trying it on all sorts of really old hardware. So if you Now normally I'd refocus this so you just have to blur your brains for a little bit But as you see over that shoulder, I'm going to get this wrong all night. That's the 2013 mac That's really blurred. You can't see and that's running chroma s flex above it wrong side again That's a hp laptop, which is running a sixth gen intel. So not relic And behind me. I'll just dip down here. There you go. That's a Lenovo running a second gen intel i3 Which is about as Low as you really want to go on a windows 10 system these days now critically what all they've all got in common is Come the end of windows 10. They're from a microsoft perspective. They're all going in the bin. So it's it's nice to see some thing out out there that could Potentially take over and I know we have linux But in my business, I deal only with home users a bit like restart. You know, you mainly see consumers and Having done this for a long time 18 years now linux has never quite got to the point where I can hand it over to someone With not a lot of technical knowledge and think yeah, you'll probably be okay because they probably won't and I know Linux is a very very good piece of software But the moment you ask an average user on the high street to open a command prompt and type this in that you've lost them That they've gone. So chrome res flex is is a nice way of getting into the google eco system And I think it's got a lot of potential. It's not there yet as we'll we'll get to in a minute, but I'll I better I better show you some show you some stuff. Is anyone has anyone got any questions at this point? Good That's what we like Okay, now here we go brace yourselves because i'm about to do something exciting here I've no idea what it was There we go excellent now As you can see i'm about to bring up the the the google chrome screen and And as you can see i've got an absolute blank screen What this actually means in real life is for this project I bought the Our gato cameling and it is without doubt the worst piece of software I've ever seen in my entire life and I've been wrestling with this since four o'clock this afternoon So if you what there's going to be a lot of tonight is you talk talking amongst yourselves for a little while Well, I just restart various capturing pieces of software. So, uh, I hope You know, you all know a few songs or perhaps a few jokes and uh, and we'll we'll do we'll do what we can And and see if we can get this all worked out This is why also James is recording this because we will need to actually stitch this back together later to make it look like It was some sort of plausible piece of live stream Bear with me a second. I am extremely sorry about this. There is going to be quite a bit of this going on right Okay, looks like I've got something going on Do do do do do do do do and flip that I normally for 18 years I have Fixed computers in the privacy of my own little shop Without an audience. So this is this is quite a a different thing for me. So, uh, right, let me Do that and do that and do that right. Okay. Can you all see that? Yep, that looks great. Yeah. Yes. They chorused Wonderful. So, uh, this is a desktop for a Hewlett Packard Sixth gen i7 so it's a Old machine which I use day in day out, uh for doing various things. So again, it's a typical sort of machine Which is going to be in a few years time with its neck on the block from a Microsoft perspective. So it's the sort of thing that I I guess Is really what chrome is about Let me just cover one other thing just before we get into the nitty gritty, uh, and I will zoom in in a minute using the the magic of technology As uh, as james, uh mentioned I also write for a website called the big tech question and this weekend we published, uh, a couple of stories on how to install chrome reflex on a pc and how to install it on a mac. Um, and these are, uh, step by step guides of how to Actually what we're going to cover tonight and and how to do it. So Don't worry so much about making notes for tonight because it's it's going to be you have access to this if if you need it as well, so it's, uh It's it's it's quite a lot. It's quite a long process, but Most of you I don't think it'll be anything that you haven't really sort of you haven't really covered before. Um, right Shall we begin ladies and gentlemen? Um to do this you're going to need, uh, google chrome because it's a chrome system and to get the usb created we need the chrome um, we need the chrome software the chrome browser To get to where we need to go we basically have a look at the chrome store I'm just going to flip mouse it there we go and we go to the chrome web store which, uh, you if you go to chrome dot google.com you can, um And go to slash web store you can get to that quite easily. So this is the inbuilt little, um App store if you like for the chrome browser. So most of you will know it and love it and have been there plenty of times before. So, um, very simply we type, uh on the right keyboard So we want the chromebook recovery utility Which is there I will see if I can just stretch that out using Absolutely the correct mouse is I honestly, I wish you could see this from this side. It's absolute chaos, right? If any of you've used a chromebook before you'll, uh, you'll be very familiar with this This is their sort of standard tool But if you're new to this in trying to experiment, um, this is what you need to do So basically you just add this to the chrome browser Now I'll have a think about life now This is the bit at one of the bits that normally tricks people out chromebook utility added to chrome No problems at all there and you can see the little chromebook icon up there when you click that it disappears So you spend the next sort of 10 minutes trying to work out where it is And if you're not too experienced with chrome, um, this can be Really annoying. Uh, just click on the little jigsaw icon piece there And voila, there it is And then you can pin that to your taskbar and give it a click And here we go Everyone with me so far Cool, right, okay Sorry, did you say there was a question James? No, no questions. I think no questions that that that's that's good. Okay. Um, and again Anyone that's used to a bit of computers. This is going to be, um, uh, quite straightforward However, just a couple of things to watch out for trying to find this. Um, there's a few do's and don'ts So I'm just going to shove in a usb stick into my computer There we go, and I'm going to click the right mouse Is there a minimum spec for the chrome away? There is not so much a minimum spec Um That's a really good put my apologies. I'm not on the right screen. So I can't see who said that so But thank you very much for your question. It's Oh, the way google are sorry russian the the the way google are Pushing it in the moment is it's very much a development product and They are saying For example that they are listing compatible machines. So Mainly that's machines From the big box shifters so your dels in your Lenovo So if you've got a del inspiron 1350 or something They may have tested this on that and say yet that is compatible If you're the sort of person that builds their own desktop or you know, you're you're a part of a restart gang And you basically Nailed something together for a customer. You sort of take your life in your hands and see what happens, but I have um one of the articles I wrote for pc pro About a oh About a year ago We had a 250 pound challenge where it was literally Chips from a reasonably price skip. It was how it was how it's based So I went out out the back here and found various bits of computers Have a retail value of about 250 quid and the idea was I had to build something that would outperform Um, it was things like the raspberry pi The slightly bigger one the keyboard that I've forgotten it's able to top head and a few of the things that the rest of the team had come up for 250 quid um And when I started with chroma s flex so just to go back side and that machine is built from it's so much mishmash junk You won't believe it. I We dare even put a name it um A chrome runs perfectly fine on that no problem at all And I've got a couple of bits and bulbs which I shall plug in later and show you it's though It's a dev product. It really is quite good. So yeah, don't worry so much about um What it is uh what it will run on because it's it's really quite uh really quite a versatile little thing now Uh Here we go. Let me grab a mouse and apologize for bonking the mic there. So, um, and this is where um You you may come across with a star with so it says Type in your name your chromebook and under normal Circumstances if you're trying to refresh your chromebook, you would type in your whatever you've got there What we need to do is go to select model from the list And as you can see when we click on this we have all sorts of manufacturers and very nicely hidden amongst it is chrome os flex And then you click that and you only have one option And it tells you quite Quite upfront that this is an unstable version. So, you know warning here be dragons and things like that And then you click continue and then you choose your usb drive again. This is all pretty uh pretty routine stuff then you click continue and then Off we go now. I'm not going to do this stage at this point Because this stage takes about 40 minutes. It's unbelievably long process It's far longer to do this bit than it is to actually install the software So i'm going to hold it here, but I guess you can guess what's about to happen. It will create the software. It will It'll put it on the usb stick just as it just say there in the in the bump It is going to wipe everything on that drive. So, please don't Uh use photos of precious An ssd drive with precious photos or anything like that um And off it goes. So that's the install process. Uh, sorry the creation process um I think the next thing we need to do is we need to try and install it. So, uh Again, I shall bear with me a second. I shall uh disappear over here and uh And I will shut all that down Did that all did that all make sense so far? Yep seems straightforward enough. It is. It's really straightforward. You know, I you know You're all experienced tech guys, you know, I You know, I'm doing this as a bit of a sort of step-by-step sort of thing You know, you all know what you're doing. Um apart from trying to find it where it is in that list There's nothing here that's going to fool you at all. So I think greg has a question Oh, is that right greg? Feel free to unmute yourself Do you have to sign up to a developer program? Before you can download it Originally at launch you did that's gone now. They don't care Which is good so anyone can do it. So I I've done all that tonight but not signing into anything So I I mentioned os flex in this month's uh pc pro And um, I mentioned about having a google business account and that was how I got access to it So wait when it first launched. Yes, it was behind That restriction at the moment. It's really not so anyone can go in Sorry, I should have explained that. Yeah, there was no signing process there that this install of windows 10 is a Fresh vanilla install with a local account Um, and nothing exciting going on. So no, you can do exactly what I've just done there Without having any of the the business accounts Greg if you were starting with the mic, what's your type your question? Sorry Sorry, we're seeing go ahead I was just going to say was the website called the big deck question. Okay Ah, yes. Yeah. Yeah big question. If you've got a totally off-brand computer Do you do you just select google chrome os flex as manufacturer? Yep, absolutely. That is the uh, yeah, it doesn't but at that point it doesn't care what you've got you um Yeah, it's one build fits all and The compatibility of what you've got in your hardware it will work out when it starts the install So there's no granulation at this point. It is that that's what you get interestingly Just to go back to wasm. Yes, it's big tech question.com and to do the two stories on here that I did the one did the The crow one and did the sorry did the mac one and did the pc one I actually interchange the installers just just for my own curiosity just on the on the on the point It mentioned so yes I built the installer on the mac and then installed it on the pc and it doesn't care It's it's the same thing. It builds the same usb drive Is and does that answer your question wasm? It's big tech big tech question.com Cool good stuff, right Drum roll here we go So what I'm going to do now is uh restart the system and then it's going to boot beautifully into the bioscreen where I I will start the procedure If any of you have a religious persuasion, please Please help me out at this point Dundududu It's all very tense Hey Lee, can this only install from usb or can it can install from network pxc at the moment? It is usb only Um, I've no doubt they will change something later down the line, but at the moment? No Okay, and as you can see this works brilliantly well Is this what they meant by i'm stable this yeah, this is the I thought, when I did the demo with you a couple of weeks ago, I thought, oh, this is brilliant. I can show you the boot screen. I can do the whole thing. And of course, for these two articles I've written, I've done all the screen captures with that and it worked beautifully last night. And today it's just behaving like a pig. So you'll have to bear with me a second while I when I sort a couple of things out. But just talk amongst yourselves, if you will. I'll we have a question from Greg Lee. Greg, fire away. Greg asks, can can you put this image on a USB hard drive? I guess so, as long as it's you will lose everything that's on it. It is a. It does wipe anything. I haven't tried it on a. Sorry, I just realised my mic's over here. I haven't tried it on a USB hard drive. But I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. It will it will repartition, reformat and give it a boot sector. So, yeah, theoretically, it shouldn't it shouldn't be a problem. But say, we'll nuke everything, a USB is probably an easier thing. You say that's never a good sound. I'm curious, has anyone in the room had much experience with Chromebooks in general or Chrome OS in general? Not talking about flex, but just kind of vanilla Chromebook. No, fair enough. Nobody there should be interesting for all of us then. And I think this is one of the great things about about flex. Particularly when I when I see Chromebooks in my shop. They're normally the really sort of low powered. You know, sort of net book sort of sort of substitutes. And it's with with this, of course, you've got a real opportunity to sort of put it on something that's sort of half decent, which is which is a nice, a nice thing. Right, OK, bear with me. And it really does fly as I'm hoping I'll be able to show you at some point. Hey, good grief. It's like pulling teeth. Right, OK, sorry about that, folks. We might have to do that again, but we are we are on. So this is the initial launch for Chrome OS flex. I'm afraid I've had to miss out the pressing F9 to boot. But I guess with the audience we've got tonight, that's not too much of an issue. So this is the Chrome screen. Let me see if I can let me just see if I can zoom in a little bit on this for you and just just give you a slightly better picture of what's going on. There we go. So it's a really nice process, actually. It also does first thing it does out the box. So I've not done anything at this point. I've just launched it. It wants to use Chrome box, which is the built-in screen reader, which I won't do because I can't pipe the audio into where we are at the moment without probably all my hair falling out, I would have said after today. But, you know, it's it's nice to see what I get is it's really not a cut down sort of thing with one exception, which we'll get to in a minute. So welcome to Chrome OS Flex, nice animation. At this point, ignore language, ignore ignore the other options. You have got accessibility options here as well. You know, you can change certain aspects. And we'll click get started. So a couple of options here and one, if you're if you're not willing to sacrifice a bit of hardware, you can actually install it on a basically run it off the USB. There is questions about compatibility of that, and it doesn't detect hardware as well. So by all means, give it a will. But it is slightly better on a bit of old hardware. And by the sounds of it, most of you have something something aged kicking about that that should do the job. I will click on that one. And there's a few warnings and and the usual stuff. Nothing exciting at this point. What they do point out about we use the wrong mouse again at g.co dash dash dash install guide dash slash there is a step by step guide of how to install. Frankly, it's nowhere near as good as the one I wrote, but, you know, that, you know, what can what can you do? So Chrome is going to erase the hard drive, which is obviously I I suspect possibly at some point that there will be a way to very nicely dual boot this, perhaps if you wanted to with another system at the moment. I certainly haven't worked that out, but because it's not a fully finished product yet, this thing updates quite rapidly, which is interesting. So probably best to leave it as a as a single operating system on a single machine. So we can just chew the fat for for a few moments. Now, it says it will take 20 minutes, but there's an SSD in this machine. I've tried to speed up the process as best as I can. But it really is it really is quite perky for the installation. At the moment, I'm only connected in via an ethernet cable. I will cover connectivity in a second. What it's doing during this stage, it's basically dumping the contents of the USB onto the hard drive. And then at the end of this process, it will shut the machine down and it will power it off. And this is the bit that or one of the things that catches you out because when Windows restarts during installation process, it restarts. Chrome doesn't. It turns off. So you can be sat there for some considerable time waiting for something to happen and nothing's going to happen. But you can also at that point pull the USB stick and and and just let it to get on with life. So we'll just have a few moments reflection as we watch this hypnotic sign go round for for a little while. Has anyone got any questions at this point? Oh, tough. You missed your chance. That's it. Got to be quick round here. OK, here we go. So it will shut down in forty nine seconds. There's not a handy little shut down now button. So I presume it might be doing something in the background here. But we'll just have to have to play it by ear. There we go. Oh, good. I can see you all again now there. I've moved my I've moved my screen. If at all to wonder, I'm wrestling with OBS tonight, as I said to James a few weeks ago, I've done three YouTube tutorials. So I am now classified as an expert. So doing all this live and with all this is a bit, as you can tell, a little rough, but hopefully it will give you an idea about what this thing can do in real time. Here we go. So. And. So the machine has gone and the light has gone off. Back to no signal. So I have pulled the USB. So nothing up the sleeve, one USB stick, dutch that and we will turn the machine on and pray to the Algato gods that it will pick up the signal and give me a picture back. I have to say the Algato captured hardware is actually really quite good. No, now my camera is gone as well. Oh, it's all gone wrong. Can anyone still hear me? Oh, there we go. We're back. The audio is fine. The audio is fine. At least at least something is really I can resort to semaphore. I can describe the rest of the process to you. Yeah, there with me a second. The Algato app has crashed again. And it is, you know, many of you probably work with Algato stuff. You know, it's it's it's it's good stuff. But the the software is absolute trash. And they're not paying me to say that. Right. OK, I have it back. I just have to now choose 38 different capture devices and voila. Right. OK. I will zoom in a little now. Can everyone see that? OK. Yeah, that looks great. Perfect. Now, it may look a little familiar. Basically, because we've put the software from the USB onto the drive, we're now repeating essentially the steps we've just done. So yeah, there is a bit of deja vu here. So I'm going to the reasons that I mentioned. And now, at this point, you do want to choose your keyboard and language. So you can go to I'm just for the hell of it, I'm going to use English United Kingdom. I do like the option for Oxford English Dictionary version, which I've I've no idea what the difference between those is. But I'm just going to choose. Oh, so again, pretty standard for that, as you can see, there's you know, there's a fair wave of of keyboard versions in there. You know, it's not a you know, it's not a restricted sort of product. I'm sure there's not everything in there, but I'm sure there's something for most people to get to get them going at the beginning. So off we go. Get started. Now connect to a network. Let me let me just bring up a. I did to do to do to do to do. There we go. Right. So, as I said, we're connected by Ethernet. What I have here, my sticky little mitts is a USB wireless adapter. There you go. This is what I quite like about Chrome, is it's it's really quite good at picking up hardware. So if I shove that in there like that, you'll see above the top of the screen, little line turns up. And there we go, we have wirelessness. And it really is quite straightforward. Now, it is a little picky about what it likes and what it doesn't like in wirelessness. That's a TP link. T2 UH, everyone's favourite wireless adapter, obviously. So a pretty common piece of kit, not particularly new. So the sort of thing that you would probably find hanging out the back of a restart as a computer or someone that's come into a cafe. This is a you can't see that because of terrible focus. That's a TP link something from a similar range. Interestingly, Chrome doesn't like that at all. So it's not universal on hardware, but it is pretty it is pretty damn fine. For just for the sake of it, I am going to pull that out and we'll just carry on this experiment on on Ethernet. So if you've got if you've got devices in your in your system, there's a good chance that that Chrome will be able to sort it out. Right. So this is the Google terms of service. Does anyone want to read this out for us? There's about 60 pages and no, OK. So Chrome account set up for ourselves or children. One thing that I love about Chromium, if you want to call it that, my I've got two kids who are seven and nine. And at the start of lockdown, we got them a couple of Chromebooks for homeschooling and stuff like that. Just two little Zeus things, nothing exciting, nothing powerful. And being able to set them up under child profiles is a really nice thing to do. And this is a good use for Chrome Flex. If you have got a young one or children or grandchildren or people like that, it's a nice little way of giving them a cheap usable machine. That you can put certain parental restrictions on, which is built into the operating system. So again, just another use for this software. So I'm going to set this up for me because obviously that's who I am. And I'm just going to there we go. This is my wondrous test account for the googly things. Right. Talk about yourself. This might take a while. Interesting point from Neil in the chat. I'm not sure whether there's a Linux equivalent child friendly distro. That's a interesting point. My knowledge of Linux isn't broad enough to know. But yeah, anyone knows one. Yeah, I think that I wasn't aware of that installation option with Chrome Flex. But I think that's a really good selling point of it. So that just, you know, just a check box almost at the beginning is this as a child going to be using this and then it's got appropriate restrictions on there. Absolutely. I've not delved into it too much for what I've done. But this is my mobile phone. And like many of us that might have the Google family link. So my daughter's devices appear in here. And this I would imagine would be the same. It will appear in this list. I can associate it with my family group and I can do certain things. And it's again, it's a nice little thing. Right, I need to generate a 2FA code. I mean, this must be absolutely thrilling on a Thursday night for you guys. I mean, you could be watching Taskmaster or something like that instead of watching me do 2FA. I'm using Orphe if there's anything there. There's the code. Right, and we're away. Again, you've got all your sync items as you would accept, expect. And you can choose what you want to do and how you want to do that. Have I lost my mouse? Again, you're having a giraffe. No, we're on, we're on. So yeah, you can choose what you want to sync. So we're talking bookmarks, wallpapers, history, apps, all the usual stuff to do with Google Chrome or you can choose to sync them afterwards. Again, there's nothing exciting going on here. Now, this is a key one. Chrome is obviously harvesting information. No surprise, it's Google. But they are particularly wanting, because of the nature of this product, they're wanting to know what it's running on. So personally, I don't have a problem with ticking the box in. Yes, you can have my hardware information because frankly, you're having everything else. You might as well complete the picture. And there is information on their website about exactly what they're collecting and what they're doing with it. But I see this as a, you're giving me something for free. I know I'm probably a product in this somewhere, but there we go. Right, Google Assistant, you can do, I would demo this for you. I've just realized there's not a microphone on this machine, but you can do the hey Google stuff. And that all works very nicely on the browser. You can train this at this point, but you can set this up later down the line. I will click that. And again, that's all the hey Google, which annoys you. And you know what? That's it. We're done. It's that quick. Look, it even did the wallpaper. Look at that branding. Bear with me a second. I'm on the wrong mouse again. There you go. And there it is. It is the full, the full WAC Chrome operating system with, you know, all your toolbars. Let me take my ugly mug out of the way. That'll help. There we go. And you've got access to two various things. Now I installed something on here earlier called COG, which is a little utility for showing system specifications. So you can see what sort of machine this is. It's Intel i7. So nothing flash or fancy, but you see it's got bags and bags of resources here, you know, which I guess is the, isn't this the ethos of restart? You know, it's a fact that, you know, in no way, shape or form is this machine ready for the bin. Now, obviously Microsoft's not quite saying that at this time, but you know, it'll be a few years down the line when Windows 10 is doff. This machine will be good for something, providing something inside. It doesn't go bang, but now I keep, I did mention a couple of times there was a bit of a gotcha. Let me just bring that down and I will try and I will try to show you what that gotcha is. Bear with me. Hold on. So this is the, this is the start menu for Chrome, which if any of you use Chromebooks, hey, oh, that worked really well. So you can see all your apps and utilities. So you've got straight access straight into the Google infrastructure. So if we open something like Google Docs, there we go, I will just click on there, get rid of that. This is all the stuff which is in everyday Google, Google Docs on a full, what you call a full-pack Chromebook that you buy from a shop. It tags into the Google Drive. That's how the restart wallpaper appears, because I've got it logged into the Google Drive. So from this aspect, you've got everything that you would have in a commercial Chromebook. The bit that's missing at the moment, I will, is the Google Play Store, which is basically what gives Google its apps. So you've got things like, click the right damn mouse. You've got things like the Play Store for books and videos and stuff like that, but apps are not here. Now, I'm led to believe it's all coming. Sorry, I'm showing you completely the wrong thing. There we go. There we go. So you've got a Google Play Store for that. What else have we got as the Play Book Store? No books in my library. Yeah, no too much about me already. And again, this will tag into whatever you've got in your Google Library and you can watch your media, which again, is great for kids and things like that. The downside with the Google Play Store being missing is the millions and millions of apps which are available for Flex are just not there yet. So if you want to play Among Us, or you want to download extra software, that ability is not there. For the digging I've done, because this is a developmental product, Microsoft, Microsoft listened to me, Google are being really just cautious about hardware because running their own software on a piece of kit is okay. When you start bringing apps in, that stresses the hardware in different ways. So I presume that once they're cool with this, they bring that on board. And the moment they bring that on board, we've got a genuine proposition here as an alternative operating system in a way that I've never seen in 18 years. We were talking about the child friendliness of Linux. I love Linux. I've run Linux plenty of times, but it's always ended up coming off my system. Because I always describe it a bit like a classic car. You've got to spend a lot of time with the bonnet up. And this is a slightly different thing for people that just want a machine that works, and particularly something on low-powered hardware. I think there's a lot of good stuff here. There's not too much more to show you. I've got a couple of things. I'm just going to squiggle my what's it over here. In the meantime, we have a question from Chris. Oh, Chris, far away. Do we know when it's likely to be out of development and in production and also how upgrades handle? Upgrades happen on the fly. So when it boots up every so often, you'll get the message in the same way that you get it on Chromebooks at the moment, which is basically you get a, there's a little pop-up option sort of at the top here, like a little toaster saying, hey, does it upgrade? And it just does it and then restarts. I guess if you go digging on the Chrome website, you can find out what that upgrade is. But they are actively doing it. I've noticed since I've been playing with this, I got involved with the restart forum post quite early on and it's changed a lot since then. So yeah, just keep an eye on it. When it will come out of development, I don't know if it ever will. Google are notorious for keeping things in development forever. So I think it will be one of those beta products which just carries on. Just whilst I'll just flip back. I did the little switcheroo with the wireless dongle as well. The other thing that you can do to it, of course, is Bluetooth, which people say, why are you using Bluetooth these days? So if I plug that in like that, it will have a think about life. And then voila, it's just picked up. And that's just a standard five pound. Sorry about that. That's my Amazon echo kicking in. That's just a standard five pound Bluetooth adapter, which now enables me to connect my mobile phone. So I can, if I'm signing in to flex on the same account as my mobile phones in, I can do passwordless sign-ins. It will detect the proximity of my phone. So all that is live and active as well. I can't demonstrate that because my phone's not on that account. But I advise you to give that a whirl. If you've got a Google phone, an Android phone, do your flex install on the same account. And that's a really nice little feature, the fact that you can start to talk to it via a mobile. Is there anything else you want to see? I don't think, like I say, because it's a bog basic sort of installation, you know, you've got access to obviously YouTube and Chrome and all the, say, tons of Google. You've got access to, we mentioned earlier, the Chrome Store. So you can get access for, oops, bear with me. I think that's an old bookmark. So you can get access to the Chrome apps that we mentioned. I'm going to type this on the correct keyboard. That will really help. While you're doing that as well, we've got a couple of questions from Waseem who asks, is there a cheap 64-bit hardware to test this product? And does Chrome remote desktop work? Chrome remote does work, which is really nice. It doesn't, oh, now you're asking me, cheap 64-bit. Yeah, I was going to try it on a Pi. I know Pi is not technically what you're talking, possibly not what you're talking about. But I've yet to find anything that this thing won't run on. There are obviously things that it won't. But yeah, basically, I've put it on some low-end stuff as well. I know I've surrounded here by Max and i5s and i3s, but I've done some Celerons and some Pentium Goals. And as I said, that 250-pound machine I did for PC Pro is an absolute crate, death trap probably. And it worked fine on that. So don't be scared of trying it on something, because chances are it'll work in some form. And if you look on the Google website for Flex, and they list sort of what machines are compatible, it's not a yes-no, it's a not-yet. So I've got confidence that this is something for us to keep an eye on, particularly in light of Windows 365, which is Microsoft's cloud computing, which is now available for enterprise, but isn't available for consumers. So we're at an interesting point with where all your home users are on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but Microsoft have launched this cloud version of Windows. So essentially, you open a browser and there's your Windows desktop, which you can see is the natural end of where home desktops are going. So I'm going to look at the camera instead of the screen. And I think this is, Chrome Flex plays a part in this, of trying to shift people away, perhaps from that Microsoft mindset that someone mentioned earlier. And it's nice to see what I think potentially could be a really valid alternative. Thanks, Lee. Just one quick point from Philip, who I believe is sharing his screen as well at the moment. What was it? Let me flick back. He says he's installed it under VMware, and it's not running particularly well, and he doesn't have any apps running along the bottom except a Google icon. So I'm not sure if you can recognize what's going on here. Yeah, that's cloud ready. That's not Flex. Oh, okay. That's a different product. Just to mention that, because he said cloud ready was a nice little system. And then, I think Google bought them, and then I think quickly sold it or squealed it away, and or have improved it, developed it, and this has come out. So yeah, this, I've used cloud ready when I've had to do remote support with people on Chromebooks and things like that, because it was a nice way of doing the remote control. It just worked very nicely. But Flex is a lot nippier, a lot more responsive. It just feels like it's not a bodge. That's an awful thing to say about cloud ready. Cloud ready always seemed like a compromise, which it was a compromise. Chrome Flex doesn't. It feels like this is the real deal. And let's say once they can get this play store sorted out, then we're stuck in diesel. We're on. Okay. I think I simply installed under VMware some binary I downloaded some months before. So that's how the mistake occurred. Absolutely. I have tried in vain to get Flex onto a VM and have failed miserably at every point, but that might be down to my VM software. It certainly doesn't work on VirtualBox. I spent a long time trying to get it to work on VirtualBox, but it works on VMware. Yes. Sorry. I mean, Flex, I can't get it to work on VMs, but at a lot of Googling shows, I'm not the only one that can't do it. But I wanted to see it on bare bones hardware because I feel as we go forward and people are wondering what to do with their Windows 10 machines come into play. Or even if you roll forward only as far as January, Windows 8 has got its neck on the block in January. So there's still a lot of Windows 8 machines out there and 8.1 and there's people going to be wondering what to do at that point. And I don't know how many of you have used Windows 11 at the moment, but again, if we say that Chrome Flex is in development, you could levy the same argument at Windows 11 at the moment, which seems to change every time you turn the damn thing on. So using the public who's guinea pigs does seem to be the du regur in the tech community at the moment. Wonderful. Cool. So it looks like we're at the end of the evening. So thanks so much, Lee. Everyone here, you survived and you did it and you got us through and it was really interesting and really useful. So thank you very much for all your work. I think Hugo wanted to say a quick word. Well, I just had a question that maybe you didn't see, James, that was, I don't know if you can install things that are more like Linux apps on it. Not at the moment, not until they get the Play Store sorted. And that's where your third party app, so your non-Google stuff comes in. So for example, my kids love to play the game called Among Us and you can't get any of that stuff until they unlock this Play Store. But there may be a way to side load stuff eventually. So if there is something that doesn't appear in the Play Store that you might be able to sort of get it to run through non-authorized means, I'm sure that will become available at some point and someone will work that out. Unfortunately, that is slightly beyond my knowledge at this point. But if it's possible, someone will work it out. But with it being a dev product, there's just, I think there's a wait-and-see element as to actually what it's going to go. But you can get access to sort of the terminal on the back end and have a look at things. But... And can you install the Linux subsystem like you can under proper Chromebooks? Not as far as I'm aware of, not at the moment. However, that was the last time I had a look at that was about three months ago. No, that's absolutely right. About two and a bit months ago, I think. So by all means, give it a try. It may be the answers, yes, yet. Google are never brilliant at sometimes saying what they've done and what they haven't done. I think possibly from fear that too many people will try something and it will fall over. So it may very well be possible. And I guess that's sort of the hope that, you know, we're talking about extending the life of old machines and keeping things going and giving people a decent alternative to Microsoft. But Chrome is also for the big boys. You look at any of their enterprise stuff, you know, it's serious gear. So if you put this software onto a decent bit of hardware and then get it to run the subsystem like you want it to, you've got some power there. So, you know, fingers crossed. Brilliant. Okay. Yeah, are there any final questions before we kind of finish up for the evening? I thought you were just jumping the gun a little bit. No. I've got the million dollar question. Aha, shoot. We've refurbished a lot of computers to give to school kids and for the low-end ones, we've been putting Neverwhere on them. Would you suggest that we now switch to use the developmental Kromos flex instead? I mean, I would say at the moment, no. I would say, because if you want, for example, if your school wants to run a certain app that they get out the play store, they can't do it. So I think that hobbles. I guess if you've got an environment where it's all web-based, you know, so basically they just need a Chrome browser, then, yeah, I guess give it a try. I don't think you've got anything to lose. If you start to want to put a specific third-party app on, you've got a problem. But stuff on a browser, which I guess a lot of kids, a lot of schools now, it is all browser-based. I think the stuff that my kids do, it's mainly browser-based. I don't think you'll have too much of a problem. And I say it's quick and it's rapid. So, yeah, I'd say give it a whirl. I can't speak for the longevity of the product, you know, and we all know ourselves through various Google products that we've loved over the years that they have absolutely brought the hammer down on it at a second's notice. But I, you know, they're obviously throwing some resource behind this and I feel it's not going to disappear anytime soon, he said. Headlines on Next PC Pro flex dead. So, yeah, I'd give it a try. Let me know if you do, though, please. I'd love to know an experience of it in the real world. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lee and James. Unfortunately, I have to leave the meeting. It's all been very interesting. I'm looking forward to trying it out myself. Thank you so much. No problem, thank you. Great. Okay, and thank you everyone for coming along this evening. And again, a massive thanks to Lee for giving up your evening and many hours before the evening trying to get all your tech to work. Thank you for your patience, everyone. I'm so sorry that, you know, that actually went far better than I thought it was going to. I thought I was going to have to draw your pictures. But yeah, thank you for bearing with me. We'll cut that out in the edit. You'll never know it happened. That's great. I can test my video editing skills. In the meantime, if you do have any further questions for Lee or just want to continue the discussion, feel free to do so in the talk topic for this evening's chat, link in the chat. And we can get you to the conversation there if anything else comes up. Or if you give it a go yourself, feel free to report back and how it went. Be curious to hear how you get on. I should also mention that currently for restart, we're in the middle of... We're currently doing a fundraising campaign at the moment as part of the Big Give. So any donations made to us this week will be doubled by the Big Give, which is very generous of them. So we're trying to make the best of it. So if you feel so inclined, if you're able to feel free to have a look at our campaign page, again, link in the chat, no pressure. But thank you again, everyone, for coming and have a great rest of the evening. Or Greg, in your case, have a great day, I guess. Enjoy and see you all very soon. Thanks, guys. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. All right, thanks.