Does musescore work on Toshiba Chromebook CB35-B3340?

• Ožu 22, 2016 - 03:37

I was looking to buy this chromebook to use musescore on http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-CB35-B3340-Chromebook-Celeron-HD-Screen/d…
Does musescore work on it?


Comments

MuseScore will not work natively on Chrome OS since you will only have access to web apps (applications living only on the web). So any desktop applications will not work on a chromebook by default.

However you can run MuseScore on Chromebook in two different ways:

1. Via Crouton: https://musescore.org/en/node/90176 You will have a fully capable MuseScore but it's a bit of work.

2. Software-on-demand service such as Rollapp: https://www.rollapp.com/app/musescore You can only save online in the free version and there is no sound for the moment. However, it's very easy to setup, just visit the website.

I use musescore on an ASUS C201 "budget" chromebook, and it actually runs very snappy, better than my quad core intel processor! I had wiped the ChromeOS entirely, though, so Chrome won't get in the way, but that is a very difficult thing to do, which I wouldn't recommend to someone who doesn't know exactly what they're doing.

There is one minor drawback to the chromebook: the keyboard doesn't have "Insert", "Delete", Home", "End", "Page Up", "Page Down" keys, which I have grown very accostumed to. So I often feel myself reaching for one of those buttons, and then realizing I have to use trackpad instead!

I have Musescore on an ASUS C300 Chromebook with 4Gb RAM and it works well. I recall having to install pulseaudio before sound worked. And it doesn't like large sound fonts on my system (I get extra funny noises). The Fluid soundfont supplied with Musescore works ok.

Your choice is OK (has Intel) but if for some reason you decided to choose a different model, make sure you get "Intel Inside". Crouton + Linux does consume some RAM so you may want to consider a model with 4Gb rather than 2. It should perform better (faster).

One thing that has burned, or maybe just singed, people in the past is some Chromebooks use ARM chips rather than Intel chips. Running apps on ARM requires the application is "compiled" for those CPU chips. So it will take much more work to get MS it to work on ARM - if it is even possible.

In reply to by jim.weisgram

MuseScore works ok on arm. Debian-based and arch linux distros I know already have musescore 2.0.2 compiled in their arm repos, although there was a couple of arm-specific bugs which have been fixed since for 2.0.3 (and there will probably be some more). Hopefully will have an official nightly arm AppImage. I can generate and send an arm AppImage in the meantime if you don't want to setup a compile environment.

More than 50% of all devices sold in US education are Chromebooks (*), so I believe it's valuable enough to dedicate a page in the handbook for the question on how to run MuseScore on a Chromebook. There is the how to page ( https://musescore.org/en/node/90176 ) but answering this question in the handbook under the installation page ( https://musescore.org/en/handbook/installation-0 ) has its value. Here is the stub: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/install-chromebook Feel free to edit.

(*) http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/03/googles-chromebooks-make-up-half-of-us-c…

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