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Google Chromebook: Chrome OS, Chromium, or Fedora Linux? Whatever …

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Dear Sister,

Remember that Chromebook that you bought for your birthday a while back? Just thought I’d let you know that I switched to the developer mode and booted up Fedora Linux off of a SD card. No harm done! :-P
Here’s a short story of what I think about this whole bizarre [almost] fairy tale.


So, Google, being the feudal lord that it is, starts this ambitious project of starting their own Operating System 1 called Chrome OS. Now, call me biased, but I think good programmers MUST have two backgrounds: 1- algorithm and data structure, 2- Unix or Gnu/Linux philosophy; and Google, being the … well, Google(!), has collected all the good ones. 2 So, no wonder why Chromium, the underlying core of Chrome OS, is actually a legit Linux distribution with a kernel and Gnu software and everything!

One thing though, Google’s idea of keeping it’s product both safe (secure boot ‘n stuff) and developer friendly is this: you get to choose between security and freedom! 3 “Bizarre”, is the only word that I could think of to describe this idea. However, I think it’s a very good place to start for a better future. Chromium developers have written a truly lovely page on the challenges and possible vulnerabilities of an ideal combination of security and freedom.

Long story short, this page from the Chromium developers helped me to switch your laptop to the developer mode. At this point you have a built-in shell called `crosh` with root access waiting for you; just push Ctrl+Alt+t after you logged in and you’ll see a new tab open up with a prompt that reads:

Welcome to crosh, type 'help' for a list of commands.
crosh> 

Pretty cool, huh? As I’ve thought you before, just type `help` to get help: 4

crosh> help

 exit
  Exit crosh.

 help
  Display this help.

 help_advanced
  Display the help for more advanced commands, mainly used for debugging.

 ping [-c count] [-i interval] [-n] [-s packetsize] [-W waittime] <destination>
  Send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to a network host.  If <destination> is "gw"
  then the next hop gateway for the default route is used.
 ssh [optional args...]
  Starts the ssh subsystem if invoked without any arguments.
  "ssh <user> <host>", "ssh <user> <host> <port>", "ssh <user>@<host>",
  or "ssh <user>@<host> <port>" connect without entering the subsystem.
 ssh_forget_host
  Remove a host from the list of known ssh hosts.  This command displays
  a menu of known hosts and prompts for the host to forget.
 top
  Run top.
 shell
  Open a command line shell.
 systrace [<start | stop | status>]
  Start/stop system tracing.  Turning tracing off will generate a trace
  log file in the Downloads directory with all the events collected
  since the last time tracing was enabled.  One can control the events
  collected by specifying categories after "start"; e.g. "start gfx"
  will collect only graphics-related system events.  "systrace status"
  (or just "systrace") will display the current state of tracing, including
  the set of events being traced.

In the Normal Mode you have almost all of these options, except for the latter two. Well, go on then:

crosh> shell
chronos@localhost / $ id
uid=1000(chronos) gid=1000(chronos)
chronos@localhost / $ uname -a
Linux localhost 3.4.0 #1 SMP Wed Mar 13 11:38:55 PDT 2013 armv7l ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l) SAMSUNG EXYNOS5 (Flattened Device Tree) GNU/Linux

Ta Dah! And that’s not all of it:

chronos@localhost / $ sudo -i
localhost ~ # id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)

I know, right? A beautiful laptop with Linux pre-installed and no hardware issues! 5 Love you Google! Keep up the good work!
Screenshot 2013-03-19 at 3.58.18 AM
Now, when did Fedora come in? About a week after all that, I saw this and this post on Google Reader 6. They are pretty self-explanatory. May I stop here? I’m very tired an it’s 3:29AM! Oh, one more thing, I know that you are learning Python programming on a Raspberry Pi, Fedora on Chromebook is like a Raspberry Pi with almost four times more RAM, more than twice CPU speed, and, of course, attached monitor, Wireless adapter, keyboard and touch-pad, 16GB SSD, and last but not least, battery! How cool is that? 7 :-D Oh, by the way, Fedoraians also have this page in their wiki about Chromebook.
Fedora 18 on the ARM Chromebook
I’ll try getting Gnome-Shell on it. There shouldn’t be any problems: the ARM package is available, we have enough RAM, what else do we need?

Okay, I think that’s pretty much it. :-)

hope you are well,
Love,
M

Notes:

  1. although I refuse to believe that they haven’t silently worked on any such projects before!
  2. and that’s probably why most other companies suck!
  3. Matthew Garrett believes nobody should be forced to make that choice, and I ought to agree.
  4. Again, as I’ve told you before, one out of many superpowers of hackers is that they know WHEN and HOW to get help when they need it, that’s why they can get what they want from any kind of shell. Anyway …
  5. Now, don’t tell me that you don’t like this distro, a true Linuxer can manage through any distro what so ever!
  6. At the time I’m drafting this post, Google has decided that they will murder Google Reader by the end of July :’( Pray to WWW Gods that they change their mind!
  7. It just lacks the GPIO pins, so as long as you are mainly into software (algorithms, etc.) and not hardware (robotics, etc.), it just works perfectly!

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