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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!