
Setting Up A Chromebook Development Laptop - thebiglebrewski
http://blog.zfeldman.com/2013-10-05-setting-up-a-chromebook-development-laptop/
======
moonchrome
As much as I like the idea of 200$ dev machines for students if they already
have working laptops by far the easiest and uniform solution would be to
distribute virtual box images, have students install virtual box and develop
inside that, even that cheap Acer would be enough to run a ruby dev virtual
box.

You can even install all ruby gems, packages and w/e you need for the class
before you distribute it for convenience.

~~~
Bahamut
Virtualization is a bit of a flawed solution - I have had issues trying to
virtualize Ubuntu on my Windows 8 desktop (my gaming machine) that would drive
me nuts, and would be far worse for students just entering web development.

It is still too fragile IMO.

~~~
rjbond3rd
Hmm, fragile in what way? For me, VMware Player has had only a couple minor
hiccups in several years, and even VirtualBox has been (buggier but) very
usable. (My machines are non-gaming.)

~~~
Bahamut
I had breaking issues like Unity crashing on a fresh VM install of Ubuntu.

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rwmj
I used a Chromebook running Fedora 17 (dual boot on a separate SD card, not
chrooted) for 2 weeks and wrote about it[1]. In summary, not too bad.

Even better: recently someone worked out how to fully root it so you can
enable hardware virtualization and sign your own kernels[2].

[1] [http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/some-thoughts-
after-2-5...](http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/some-thoughts-
after-2-5-weeks-with-the-samsung-chromebook/#content)

[2]
[http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/568943/fd91a17213c1e788/](http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/568943/fd91a17213c1e788/)

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Also, yes, I can echo the trackpad not working so well and suspend kind of
failing to do it's job - only seems to work after opening and closing the
laptop several times.

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someperson
Does anybody have a way to do Android development on a ARM Chromebooks? The
Android SDK is not available on ARM (probably will never be).

I have used AIDE
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl=en))
to with Github and Dropbox with some success, but I feel it could be a lot
more polished - but it works as far as I can tell.

A Chromebook + modern Android smartphone/tablet is powerful enough to provide
a very good development environment (no need to emulate a device). It's held
back by Eclipse being slow and bloated and Android SDK being unavailable.

Is there any hope for me other than getting a more powerful laptop? I feel
like I people around the world should be able to write great Android software
with a Chromebook + android device, but they currently can't

~~~
devx
Yeah, with 64-bit ARM chips and 4GB+ RAM devices coming out soon, it's time
for Google to prepare an ARMv8-based SDK at least. They wouldn't need to
support earlier hardware, since they're not that powerful anyway.

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ChikkaChiChi
I recently posted on G+ that if the hardware were more open, the Pixel would
be the flagship Linux developer machine.

The problem is that I don't want to get a laptop and spend countless hours
getting it to "just work"

~~~
minor_nitwit
I saw someone post that apparently, the display resolution is too high which
creates scaling problems with most DEs.

I don't really understand the gimped ChromeOS approach, they should just give
it a real terminal, and a Debian based 'app-store'.

~~~
samspenc
This! If only Google would give us a real terminal and Debian (or other) app
store (a real app store with Eclipse, Thunderbird, etc, please) in
Chromebooks, I would buy one in a jiffy!

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pjbrunet
I think it's better to learn violin on a Stradivarius. (Start out using
Linux.)

And 4 hours battery life? Not really enough IMO, especially for a slow Celeron
:-/

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Haha I like the analogy!

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MatthewPhillips
I love developing on a Chromebook but I use ChromeOS because I prefer it... am
old laptop to use as a server and Secure Shell app is all I need.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
True that, I could totally get by on just vim but I'm sure my beginner
students would be a little intimidated! ChromeOS is pretty amazing, I love the
simplicity.

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MrMeker
I have the same setup on mine. Aside for a weird trackpad grounding issue that
sometimes messes up the screen after extended two finger scrolling while on
battery power, it is really nice. I just have to touch the VGA port every few
minutes. I am planning on expanding the RAM to somewhere between the 2GB it
came with and the 16GB it supports. I might also put in a laptop hard drive.

~~~
OafTobark
How is the trackpad if you keep it stock?

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thebiglebrewski
It's really not amazing. Considering buying a mini-mouse for this guy.

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brianfcoleman
I have used crouton to install Debian with xfce on my Samsung Chromebook. It's
a bit on the slow side compared to my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu but the lack
of a fan makes it an awesome little machine. I just wish that there was a
version of the Pixel with an arm processor inside.

~~~
Nursie
Crouton is a good thing then? I know a friend of mine said it works well, and
you effectively get a full DE running alongside ChromeOS on (effectively)
another virtual desktop.

I've been dual-booting my ARM chromebook with Chrubuntu on an SD card, though
debian is my preferred distro. I find that 90% of the time ChromeOS (with
'Developer Mode' shell unlocked) is good enough for what I use a computer for.
The other 10%, well rebooting is pretty quick.

~~~
brianfcoleman
I haven't tried dual booting but the nice thing about having debian in a
chroot is that I can easily switch back and forward between ChromeOS and XFCE.
Plus I'm guaranteed that all the hardware is fully supported. When I have
encountered an issue with crouton, it's a sufficiently small project that you
can hack up the scripts to work around stuff. David Schneider, who maintains
the crouton project is also very responsive to any issues that are reported.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
He really is! He got back to my GitHub issue in a manner of hours. That guy
rocks.

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tbarbugli
9Gigs of disk space...

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thebiglebrewski
It doesn't seem like much, but this is why we have GitHub and the cloud!

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xdd
I still remember the $4899 price tag on IBM T-series. Everything today compare
to that period is a bargain. Xeon and Ecc is what developer should use for
stability(VMs) and decent speed.

$200 coding machine is not a bad idea, but I just cannot figure out where to
use it.

~~~
evol262
The idea that you need a Xeon for VM "stability" and "decent speed" is one of
the more asinine things I've ever heard. There's no real advantage to a Xeon
over an i5 for 99% of developer workload.

~~~
xdd
It is not Xeon but the surrounding hardware.

A Bit error in calculation may cause problem in CAD/CAM, Finance or Virtual
Machines. Intel does not allow ECC memory with i5 or i7; It is the idea for
environments where cannot tolerate bit errors. You will see some odd errors in
your VMs after running(rendering) heavily for as little as few hours.

Other examples is model rendering. Intel only allowed 32G memory for i5/i7
CPUs and you need to leave certain free memory while doing that. It end up you
can only use 2-3 core instead 12 core which makes your process slower.

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chernevik
Does crouton have issues with hibernation on lid close? I've been using
ChrUbuntu, and it is great, but it often fails to wake up after a lid close.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
It actually does, which is kind of sad...I sometimes have to close and open 2
or 3 times before it wakes up. It's weird though because you can still vaguely
see the screen image as if it's just a problem with the backlight.

~~~
Nick_C
Try ssh'ing into it and see if you can get a shell. `xbacklight -get` shows
the current backlight setting. Also, when resuming I often get this in
/var/log/syslog: "ACPI: No _BQC method, cannot determine initial brightness".

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Hmm, I guess I could SSH into it but it seems a bit more trouble then it's
worth! I don't mind opening the lid 2 or 3 times...although I wish they'd fix
the kernel on that one.

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pearjuice
In terms of operating system support, ARM is really a deal breaker.

~~~
seabrookmx
The Acer runs an Intel chip, as do all other Chromebooks/boxes except for the
base model Samsung Chromebook.

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drwl
> go into read article about chromebook development

> signup for nitrous.io

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Haha so tru

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bond
If only could be used for android development...

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seabrookmx
It can.

I have the Android SDK on my Samsung series 5..

There's only a single Chromebook that runs on an ARM chip. I have no idea why
everybody thinks all these devices are ARM based.

~~~
readme
It can, but it would suck. You need a bigger monitor than a chromebook has for
android development. You definitely need at the very least, 2 monitors.

Also, the CPU would be so slow on that thing that eclipse would run like
molasses. IntelliJ _might_ be faster but I kind of doubt that too. Of course,
you don't _need_ an IDE, but lets face it: most people developing for android
are going to use an IDE. Not the sdk tools + vim or emacs. Those really aren't
sufficient because you need a visual tool to develop the UI. Yeah, I code it
in XML, but you need a preview before pushing to the device because building
and deploying an android app can take almost a minute sometimes. Not fast
enough to change one XML attribute and test....

~~~
seabrookmx
This really depends on the app.

If you're doing 3D game development, you're never going to touch the Android
native UI stuff.

And the difference between vim and Eclipse is a huge gap. Lots of people are
right in the middle and use things like Geany or Sublime Text 2.

Not saying it's optimal either, I'm just saying I've written quite a bit of
code on a Chromebook and it isn't unbearable. The only people I would advise
it for though is webdevs, as they avoid the sluggish compile times.

