futuremint

futuremint

Dave Woodward  //  Father and Programming Language Enthusiast. Has a love/hate relationship with computers. Insufferable iconoclast in almost all walks of life. Prefers dynamic languages with s-expressions and unpretentious technology. However, still prefers small words. And irony.

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ChromeOS

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Dec 17, 2010 / 12:49pm

Cr48 after a few days

The only thing the Cr48 has been good for so far: checking weather, e-mail & twitter. Not a big surprise I suppose.

I haven’t used it much other than that, nor have I really been motivated to. Even sitting in front of the television, if I have a laptop I also have Emacs or Pharo Smalltalk open and I’m hacking on something (for work or fun). I do use GMail and Chrome on my main computer, however most of my work happens outside of those applications.

However so far the Cr48 has been great to leave lying around for other people to use on a whim. Yesterday the wife got on it to check for school closings. We also have an iPad which is used exactly the same way… but there are other things on the iPad to distract. Not to mention that the kids come running when they hear the iPad unlock like cats to a can opener. Not having any good games and an intimidating keyboard actually helps the Cr48 in this situation.

I tried to find an easy way to install emacs… or even gcc on it in dev mode without loading a new OS image on it. I didn’t see an easy way (even compiling from source would be “easy” in this case). I suppose it’d be nice to have someone make a binary package of gcc available thats compiled with the proper targets on Chrome OS. It’d be nice if Google made a “dev tools” installation a la OS X, where one could just install a package and start compiling programs.

I understand that that is counter to their intent of the OS though… no local data. As a developer… I guess I need local data. At least a little bit, even if it is synced from “the cloud” somewhere.

Personally I’m not ever going to take a stock Cr48 to a coffee shop or travelling. I always need Emacs (most of my notes are in Org-mode files). I tried Ymacs … but the keybindings are all conflicted with Chrome.

So if I were to embrace this “no local data” thing… I’d need a web app that behaves like Emacs on Chrome OS. I’d upload my files I’m working on (or just push my changes using a SCM), login to the app and use a Ymacs-like web UI to edit files. So thats my idea… you can have it. You’re welcome :)

(I also know of Skywriter (formerly Bespin) from Mozilla Labs. They have a “Skywriter Server” that I might look into as well that does pretty much what I just said).

Filed under  //  ChromeOS   Google Cr48  

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Dec 15, 2010 / 11:45am

Chrome OS

So I filled out the form to get a Google Chrome Notebook (Cr48). The company I work for uses a Rails app. for the main part of their business (and I've ensured pretty much all other functionality has a web-based counterpart). We have some employees in the field and I've outfitted one of them with a cheap Asus netbook runing Ubuntu Netbook Edition to try to provide a minimal UI with only our web apps. available.

Chrome OS would be a much better fit for what I want to do, however I haven't had the time to do a custom build of it for that netbook. I mentioned this when I filled out my form. Anyway, I guess I'm in the pilot program now as the doorbell rang at lunchtime today and a heavy-ish box was there with a Cr48 inside.

I'll post a bit as I use it, but these are my first impressions.

It popped right on when I opened the lid.  I entered my google account info and setup went smoothly. I have futuremint.com on Google Apps, and that account worked fine and has been consolidated into their standard account system earlier, so the fact that it works seems contrary to a little I've read elsewhere about this.

Its a bit disorienting having just a browser as your OS UI.  I wanted to start changing settings and it took me a few minutes to realize that I should click on the "wrench" menu in Chrome to go find other Settings.

One of the first things I did was remap the Search (what is normally your Caps Lock) key to Ctrl as I always do that on keyboard.  Wrench -> Settings -> System was all it took.

Also the default fonts are pretty ugly.  I've reset them all to their Droid varients which are some of my favorite.

People seem to complain about the touchpad... but I've been using a pretty crappy tiny one on my ZaReason laptop for the past few months, so this touchpad actually seems to be an improvement.  Its obviously inferior next to a MacBook's glass trackpad.

Lastly, I really like the keyboard.  I've always hated special keys on keyboards and I love Emacs, so the gigantic Ctrl & Alt keys on the left-hand side of the spacebar are great.  The  first 5 "function" keys (there aren't any, these are special keys in their place) all do browser commands, like forward, backward, reload, fullscreen & next tab.

So now I'm going to switch it (literally, there is a switch in the battery compartment!) to developer mode and see if I can install git & emacs or something.  I've heard you can't... but I can still try :).

I'll do some more updates later as I use it.
Filed under  //  ChromeOS   Google Cr48  

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