I got a cheap and light Chromebook from Amazon for HDTV streaming and to handle mail and light C development and testing while on the road. I used "crouton" to load the latest Ubuntu linux next to the ChromeOS that it comes with, added the Windows emulator Wine 1.7 on an outboard SD card, ran the usual winetricks fixes, and the LotRO wrapper PyLotRO. I tried downloading the client, but "lotrostandard.exe" and "lotrohigh.exe" both abort immediately when run with Wine. I then copied my whole running LotRO from another system to a USB-connected external hard disk, hooked it up with PyLotRO, and tried running it.
It works! It took some dinking to get the resolution right and dumb down the graphics to medium to make sure it wasn't in slideshow mode, and suddenly I was playing real LotRO at 30 fps. I haven't tried it in a raid or anything of that sort, but for soloing it's perfectly reasonable.
Acer C720 Chromebook specs:
$200 all in
11.6" screen, 1366x768 pixels
Intel Celeron 2955U 1.4 GHz (Haswell micro-architecture)
Integrated Haswell graphics
2 GB RAM
16 GB SSD for the main disk (ChromeOS and Ubuntu 13.10/Unity fit on it with about 8 or 9 GB left over)
Slots: USB 2.0, USB 3.0, HDMI, SD card
Weight about 2.5 pounds; about 3 pounds with the power brick.
8.5 hours battery life with typical edit/compile/test; 2.5 hours battery running LotRO full up.
I'm sure this is well below the recommended minimum hardware! It's not for the faint of heart, though: not everybody will be comfortable loading Linux on it as soon as they get it out of the box. The "crouton" instructions are quite clear and straightforward and would be no trouble for a typical geek, though.
It works! It took some dinking to get the resolution right and dumb down the graphics to medium to make sure it wasn't in slideshow mode, and suddenly I was playing real LotRO at 30 fps. I haven't tried it in a raid or anything of that sort, but for soloing it's perfectly reasonable.
Acer C720 Chromebook specs:
$200 all in
11.6" screen, 1366x768 pixels
Intel Celeron 2955U 1.4 GHz (Haswell micro-architecture)
Integrated Haswell graphics
2 GB RAM
16 GB SSD for the main disk (ChromeOS and Ubuntu 13.10/Unity fit on it with about 8 or 9 GB left over)
Slots: USB 2.0, USB 3.0, HDMI, SD card
Weight about 2.5 pounds; about 3 pounds with the power brick.
8.5 hours battery life with typical edit/compile/test; 2.5 hours battery running LotRO full up.
I'm sure this is well below the recommended minimum hardware! It's not for the faint of heart, though: not everybody will be comfortable loading Linux on it as soon as they get it out of the box. The "crouton" instructions are quite clear and straightforward and would be no trouble for a typical geek, though.