Word on ARM tablet
28 Dec 2017Word on ARM tablet
At first sight there is nothing special in the picture, a netbook running MS Word. A more close view and one can observe that the word processor is really appearing inside one Chrome tab. In fact, it is really a tab in Chrome OS running on one Asus Chromebook C100 Flip. It is an inexpensive chromebook mounting an ARM type processor including ~9 hours of battery life. How is it done if at the moment neither wine or virtualbox programs have a stable ARM version?
A client-server scheme showing the software layers needed to run MS Word in this C100 chromebook |
The trick is that the chromebook is running crouton behind the scene. This crouton (a Debian chroot in my case) is running a rdp “ssheathed” connection managed by Remmina to a headless virtualbox machine server running the Word of a W7. LAN connections are ok and fluid but WAN connections could be tricky. In this case of slow connections, I prefer running directly x11vnc (also managed by Remmina). There are few program utilities not runnning in ARM processors still there and needing this kind of nested/layered connections.