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Yes, I just couldn’t resist the temptation and I installed Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat Netbook Edition on my Cr-48. It was somewhat painful, I must say, because of various reasons (running VirtualBox was one of them). However, in the end everything worked out fine. I used this forum thread (#6 and #7), and the “official” source. One of the most challenging part was related to chroot, but it turned out to be very simple if you look at the forum post. I tried to create a chroot by following Chromium OS Developer Guide at first which was a mistake because things are much simpler in our case. You need to just install dchroot and proceed as stated in the first reference. Every step is described clearly and I believe you’ll be able to get Ubuntu running on your Cr-48. All you need is patience and time. You are not likely to screw up too badly. Plus, you can always restore to the original state.
One last remark (I got a little careless here) can be the following. If you are going to use an external drive or something to copy rootfs.bin to your Cr-48 please make sure the file system is not FAT32 
on your drive. Since the size of the file is greater than 4 gigs, you will not be able to copy it. On the other hand, if you format the drive as NTFS, this time you’ll see that Google Chrome OS does NOT support NTFS (yet?), so you’ll not be able to mount it. I ended up moving all my documents out of my external drive and format it as Ext3 to make this work (Well, this hassle gave me a chance to clean it up a little ). Maybe there is an easier way, but I just wanted to get over this as quickly as I could.
Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook edition looks great. It’s well polished and I believe it might be the state of the art for netbooks at this point. It is lightweight and it boots up really fast (thanks to SSD).
I don’t know what is next now I’ve enjoyed playing with this toy recently and I appreciate Google has made it so easy to hack your own device.
In my earlier post, I promised to write more about the Chrome OS and Cr-48 and here I am. First of all I had the chance to use the computer for a couple of days, so I discovered more about the system.
Just a couple of remarks on the hardware related stuff; the keyboard is awesome, but the touchpad is pretty problematic. Selecting text is painful, clicking on the mouse button moves the cursor and you miss the link/button you are trying to activate. You get used to it after a while which makes it a little more bearable. I also tried connecting my Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 and I didn’t have any problems except I had to adjust the sensitivity. This type of settings can be reached at chrome://settings.
I’ve been using Cr-48 for my casual needs such as watching stuff, browsing, trying some applications and games, etc. It is obvious there are several problems related to flash. It crashes quite often which can be annoying after some point. While I was watching some shows on Hulu, I realized that the video was not playing very smoothly. I mean, it wasn’t too bad, but it was definitely noticeable. Considering we are gradually switching to HTML5, it might not be a significant problem in the long run. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about this subject to make further comments. I think there is no media player on Chrome OS yet. Their assumption might be, everything will be streamed online, so the browser should be enough. On the other hand, I don’t know what to do with my stuff on the external drive if I wanted to play them on the laptop. I think this can actually be an important issue because people will ask/look for it. The applications such as TweetDeck, Google Talk, Scratchpad etc. are nice and useful, I tried only one game called the Fancy Pants and it was quite amazing. It is somewhat similar to a game called N I used to play a long time ago.
Now, here is the fun part. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I believed there must be a way to get a real shell as opposed to what you get by default called crosh. I did some research on this and found out how to enable this super cool Developer Mode. You can definitely call it an easter egg (We love you Google). First you take out the battery, then when you look closely at the connection part, you’ll see something suspicious right next to it, a black tape! Then naturally you want to find out what is concealed underneath that tape and peel it off. There, you will see a small switch. Again naturally you want to toggle the switch and see what happens, right? Do it! Then put the battery back on (yeah, that’s it) and boot up your machine. You will see an unhappy computer picture with the message, “Chrome OS verification is turned off. Press space to begin recovery.” Well, be brave and don’t press space. Instead, press Ctrl-D.
It’ll take you to another screen which will erase your current data on the computer to switch to Developer Mode. Technically, it is not too bad because almost everything you save on the OS is somewhere in the cloud. I think I needed to change back some of my settings but that was it. It takes 5-15 min, I don’t exactly remember. Now, you can boot your computer in Developer Mode. Hurray! So, what is the deal? Why did we do this? Essentially, you can now install other operating systems on Cr-48 as well as switching to other versions of Chrome OS. To be honest, I haven’t read about that very much, because I don’t have any intentions to use other operating systems on this computer yet. I’d rather discover Chrome OS more. However, it might be cool to have Mac OS X on Cr-48. On the other hand, the laptop will definitely look like a cheap Macbook bootleg and I’m not sure I’d want that
Let’s go back to our first goal which is getting a real shell. Now press Ctrl-Alt-t and get crosh. Now when you type help, at the bottom you’ll see an addition to the list, the shell command. Type shell and hack happily ever after! Now, the rest of it is up to you. Oh, one last remark; when you have the shell, you’ll look for a text editor. I use Emacs for coding, but I almost always use Vi in the terminal to make simple edits. I was surprised when I couldn’t find Vi or Nano installed. Don’t panic! There is qemacs for you. I still like Vi more for shell in-line editing, but I can live with that.
As future work , I would like to discover more about the package manager, develop some code, read more blogs about what is going on, send feedback to Google and keep my promises, maybe try a different OS on Cr-48 (yeah, it is actually tempting) and eventually be the ruler of the world.
Peace out!
Chrome OS
Almost a week ago, I applied to Chrome OS pilot program through this link. There is nothing special with the application, it is more like a survey about how you use your computer. Today, I found a box on my doorstep. First I thought it might be a Christmas gift from my girlfriend, but when I took the Cr-48 out of the box I was shocked. After a quick glance at the manual, I turned on my new toy
The hardware is very primitive. It has Intel Atom N455 1.66Ghz, 2gigs of ram, 1 usb, 1 VGA input and a webcam The only problem I had so far is related to the touchpad. It is really flaky. Technically, it is similar to Mac’s trackpad, but it is very far from that quality. I am sure there will be a software fix at least for the sensitivity issue. The cursor moves as you click on the mouse button which is quite annoying.
You can get some sort of a limited terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+t, but it supports very few commands most of which are ‘ssh’ or network related. I have been playing with it for only half an hour now, so I need to look into that a little more. I am sure there is a way to get a real terminal.
The operating system is very easy to use. Well.. Basically, you are using Google Chrome. It was really easy to switch because I was synchronizing everything; the bookmarks, apps, extensions, history, etc. I took a look at the Web Store for applications and I want to try some of them tonight. I am pretty sure they have almost everything for general use. Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc. are already very convenient.
OK, I’ve gotta go and test this brand new toy. I’ll tell the rest of the story later. Considering this OS is merely for general applications, I can see why people might want to use it. It is fast, very lightweight and hence does not require any special hardware which makes it economical (well, the OS itself is free anyway). Maybe it is still not the right time to switch to this type of operating system, but considering the recent cloud based developments and emerging services, I think it might be a hint about what kind of technology we will face in the new decade.
Oh, wait.. Here is a snapshot of the funny safety warning flyer. As you see, the first sentence is “Don’t panic”
