Once again, a new year means new toys. This holiday season, my wife got me an Acer C7 Chromebook, a pair of PowerLine ethernet adapters and a new printer. We also got new phones. On the non-techy side, she got me some classic Big Little books. The techy stuff has its own set of issues. The books, as usual, bring simple joy. More on the books in a later post.
The Acer C7 is a dual Celeron processor netbook or laptop, depending on how you classify such things, which I'm using to write this blog entry. It comes with Google ChromeOS. Of course, the first thing I wanted to do is replace the OS with stock linux. Sadly, this version of the Chromebook uses an Intel-based board, which comes with the new and magical crap known as UEFI. Don't get me wrong – bios needed to be made modern. But adding all that “secure” crap doesn't help at all. Not for the consumer. All it helps is Microsoft and Intel. And that's a bad idea. The arm people seem to understand this and u-boot will thus rule the world.
In the mean time, you need to have a signed kernel to boot. You get this on the Chromebook, which is running a Linux distro under the hood (it might even be Ubuntu for all I know). You can't just install a distro. Instead, you have to resize the partitions on the disk and install your own root file system. This is exactly what ChrUbuntu does. You boot the box, wait for its display manager login page, switch VTs and login. You then grab a script and run it. It automatically resizes the partitions and downloads the rootfs for Ubuntu 12.04. A few extra commands get the box to boot directly into Ubuntu. From there you can upgrade to 12.10, install a usable desktop (XFce instead of gnome 3) and get a development platform installed. Sadly, there is no such script or methodology defined for a meaningful distro such as Fedora. There may be some alternative distros available, such as Arch Linux and maybe Mint, but I've not investigated them because, well, neither of them is fedora.
The problems start if you find the default kernel doesn't have required components. I wanted nfs but the kernel doesn't include it. That's because you have to use the kernel that came with the Chromebook and the Chromebook is all about using your handy hardware to shove your data to the cloud (which seems silly if you're a developer since you've probably already invested a ton in local storage). That means Chromebook users aren't expected to access local data stores. Unfortunately, you can't just compile a matching kernel. First, the kernel is 3.4.0, which you can't even find on kernel.org (it's in the ChromeOS git repo). And even if you did, you can't just add the loadable modules, at least not for NFS because the kernel modules require modifications to the kernel itself.
My solution to this was to use sshfs instead. Sshfs is a FUSE layer that allows “mounting” remote file systems to the local users directory structure using nothing more than SSH. For the purposes of writing documents, this works fine so I can ignore NFS for now. But sshfs is not robust enough for doing things like running a Buildroot build. Extracting big tar files, for example, exposed some problems. So as long as all I'm doing is editing a document on a remote file system, I'm okay. Anything more and I'll need NFS.
There is a fairly well described method of upgrading the kernel. It's not for the faint of heart, but anyone who can follow my technical posts should be able to handle it. I got about half way through it without any issues before realizing I could use sshfs instead. So I haven't tried the complete process, but maybe by the time I need it the process will be further automated.
The Chromebook itself is rather nice. The screen is clean and bright – very helpful for my aging eyeballs. The keyboard is small but fits my fingers just right. The keyboard layout is fine too – your average QWERTY layout without numkeys. Sadly, the battery only lasts about 3.5 hours. Pretty crappy compared to my Galaxy Tab S2 (last years birthday gift – momma knows I love my toys), which doesn't need recharging for 3 or 4 days even if I use it to watch movies while I do my 45 minute runs at the local club. But wireless works out of the box. It has bluetooth but I don't have any bluetooth devices. The touchpad doesn't do two finger scrolling, though its supposed to (driver problem, I guess). I use wireless USB mice on laptops anyway. It's got 3 USB ports, an SD card slot and wired ethernet. All in all, it should work fine for getting me some quality writing time each night before I go to sleep.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Ubuntu. I think I'll save that for a later post too. But one thing: what is it with Ubuntu distros being named Prefixbuntu? Some unnatural level of narcissim there, I think. Just wait for the ARM desktop distros: ChARM, SwARM, alarm, mARMalade, etc. How clever all we software people are, eh?
My wife also got me a wrap-around pillow that I can sit up and lean back on in my bed, which means that with the new Chromebook I should be able to hack out a few more blog entries than last year. Hopefully it will also mean I'll finally get down to writing my first real work of fiction, something I've wanted to do since I was 10 years old. I loaded Writer's Cafe on the Chromebook. We'll see if that helps or is any more motivating than the notes on my home wiki.
As for the other techy stuff, the printer is wireless, includes a scanner (supported under sane and gimp) and works great. I was able to install it in a fairly short time. The Powerline ethernet adapaters were a failure. While I did get some connections between the two adapters when plugged into an outlet, the connection was unstable and throughput was significantly worse than 802.11.g connections in the house. The phones are also a bit of a bust. I bought cheap Virgin Mobile phones with no contracts. The phones need to be recharged daily even when they aren't being used (no calls, no texting, no apps running), the back cover will pop off if you aren't careful plugging in the power cord, the voice recording for my personal message is terrible, and I can't find a whole lot of use for all the stupid android apps. It is, after all, a friggin phone! We're considering switching back to Sprint and getting their cheapest phones, which is what we had previously. That phone (at least my previous bottom of the line Sprint phone) was going strong when last used and worked fine for what I needed it for – talking to people using our actual voices. What a concept.
The outdoor holiday decorations came down today (to keep the HOA off our butts) so now all that's left to do is spend a year enjoying the spoils of the past season. Now I can spend more time finishing up PiBox and xbmc. I actually have them compiled and installed to an SD card. I'm just waiting for a replacement keyboard (the old one stopped working with the Pi and beagleboard) to see if I've finally conquered my own distro with XBMC. Crossing my fingers…..