Using the Google Cr-48 for Coding | Hacker News Reader

Using the Google Cr-48 for Coding

ejohn.org

125 pointsadamhowell63 comments

Useful comment posted from Chrome team member Jen:

I’m a Chrome team member and saw this going around Twitter.

Just wanted to say, you can right-click on the Cr-48 by tapping with two fingers (or holding Alt and single clicking).

You can also flip the developer mode switch under the device and get full access to a shell: http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device

hope this resolves some of the comments!

That was me. Happy to answer further questions here, though I don't want to turn HN into Reddit.

(No, I'm afraid I don't know when or if you're going to get one.)

Is the trial likely to extend to other countries?

The devices we have right now will all be given out to US pilots.

(* applies for citizenship / enrols in flight-training programme)

Does Chrome OS use X11 at all? If so, is there a window manager or is Chrome itself serving that function?

There is a window manager. You can dig into the code via chromium.org if you want to understand the details :)

Do you at least know if whether or not you signed up using the "basic" form or advanced form matters for the early shipments? I signed up about half an hour after the form was live and then found the advanced form and signed up using that instead. Judging by reports from other Cr-48 recipients, I should have signed up using the "basic" form. Can you confirm this?

I know nothing about the distribution side, sorry.

Why don't you let people install ChromeOS on existing netbook? It's linux based, it should work on any netbook. Also, most of those machines have the same hardware anyway.

Try these instructions: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide#TOC-Gett...

Linked from that page is a list of hardware known to be compatible with Chrome OS: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/getting-dev-hardware/dev...

Have fun!

Thank you. That's interesting. However, mine was more a policy question. ChromeOS is not thought to be just another OS you can download and install. It will be mainly bound to new devices. I don't understand why.

Presumably it's like OS X -- it's a lot harder to make an OS that runs on any old hardware than it is if you know the hardware ahead of time.

Absolutely. Also, there are plenty of great open source developers contributing to the Chromium project to help get the OS working on multiple platforms. If you have an Eee or Dell Mini, for example, there are builds for those freely available.

Keep in mind, while reading this, that the Cr-48 is a beta product of sorts. So the mentioned hardware faults will most likely be fixed when this thing actually ships.

Somewhat unrelated:

Right now my ideal laptop would be: Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G.

I couldn't agree more, that really would be a perfect laptop.

I'm extremely happy with my 13" MacBook Air and its 7 hour battery life. Chances are, I'll be tired of looking at my laptop before I'll encounter a situation where I run out of juice, and I have my iPad to tether, even though not technically allowed...

There's a Trekstor Portable 3G/HSPA Wifi router (a Rebranded Huawei E5) on its way to me right now. Lack of built-in 3G in the Macbook Air is a little annoying - I'd prefer it over the SD card slot - but this little router should do the trick. Dragging an iPad around together with an Air just for the 3G seems a little over the top. :-) An iPhone 3GS or 4 with bluetooth tethering would be OK I suppose; my 3G's modem is annoyingly slow (384kbit/s) due to lack os HSPA support.

Sounds like a 13" Air with 3G. I agree, too — would be a super sweet machine. I'd like to see them offer 3G on the 11" Air, too!

Sony Vaio Z, well other than the battery part.

Oh yeah, 1920x1080 on a 13". :-)

The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one.... Surprisingly the laptop arrived this morning and I’ve been having fun putting it through its paces.

Oh stop being humble. :P I don't think it's surprising in the least that the creator of JQuery was able to snag a Cr-48. ;)

Nor is it inappropriate.

If you run "Shell In A Box" on the server you can browse to a full bash prompt in a browser tab. It even has Tab-completion and works with ncurses apps too.

You just run a tiny daemon and then connect to it such as https://192.168.1.1:4200

http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/

172.16.1.199:22

Basic summary:

Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac.

Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others]

Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.

I've since been able to flip over into developer mode (you have to toggle a physical switch to enable it). It gives you a proper shell (which allows you to install an SSH key) but beyond that there doesn't seem to be much else that you can do (it's not obvious to me how you would install a package or compile code).

Good to know, SSH keys are essential to a lot of people. Seems strange that the "normal" terminal doesn't support them, though...

Thanks for the write-up! I found it useful :)

edit: a thought: mind trying `compgen -abc` at the terminal? Idea came from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/948008/linux-command-to-l...

I'm guessing that the lack of proper ssh key support is part of the desire to have nothing permanent on the device. Since one of the security aspects is to make it so that if you lose the machine, you have no risk of compromising your information. Having your private key stored on the machine kind of defeats that purpose.

That being said: when I was playing with dev builds on my netbook last year, the first thing I did was put my private key on it.

That's a very good point, I hadn't thought of it from that perspective.

Though you could refer to SSH keys which are on a USB drive, fully protecting your info if your laptop is lost (as long as your drive wasn't plugged in)...

compgen: http://pastebin.com/Mkyv9990

Though I think you're misunderstanding this machine as both a developer machine and something more than just a browser. Chrome is really the only app. That I can get to a terminal at all is a huge surprise to me, I don't believe this is supposed to compete with normal laptops as dev machines. I didn't expect this to have ssh installed at all.

As a matter of fact I can't figure out how to (or if I can) copy/paste in the shell, I scp'd that somewhere else so I could post it.

Oh, I fully understand the disconnect there. I'm just interested in how far this thing can be bent, and how easily. And this was the first thing I came up with, however poor it may be.

Thanks much for the (sc)paste!

edit: wow, there's not much there, is there? The only text editor I see is qemacs, which I've never touched: http://man.cx/qemacs and no clue on copy / paste.

    I wanted to quickly crunch some numbers and went looking 
    for a calculator. Surprisingly there wasn’t one in the 
    store. I ended up having to use the JavaScript console to 
    do the calculations – which, I suspect, is not what 
    Google expects most users to do.

But Google Search is a calculator!

And Wolfram Alpha.

After seeing those large ALT and CTRL keys, looking down on my Thinkpad's keyboard and seeing FN|CTRL|WIN|ALT makes me sad.

This seems like what to expect at this stage. Something to dismiss as a toy because you can't create anything serious on it... yet.

There has to be a reason Google is bundling Flash on this thing, and I bet the reason is not that Google thinks Flash is so awesome. That has to be the first part of a trade with Adobe.

I guess we'll find out how photoshop.com with NaCL plugins works out. :)

Pitted against Chrome, Flash supports webcams, microphones, cross-domain requests, DRM on video/audio, and a certain amount of multithreading through Pixel Bender. Plus (and this is huge) a designer-friendly content creation tool. HTML5 is gaining fast, but there are still some legitimate advantages for Flash.

HTML5 has every one of those features (DRM not so much, though it's possible with binary XHR Blob buffers, but there's no point to do that as users could easily steal video data from the decoded output canvas).

Webcams and microphones can be accessed via the HTML5 <device> API, cross-domain requests can be done with HTTP Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which is arguably much nicer than Flash's cross-origin policy XML file solution, and multithreading can be done with web workers.

Cool, didn't know CORS was implemented so widely, and its true about WebWorkers. But Chrome doesn't support <device> yet, or DRM. (I only mention DRM since the Youtube team says its one reason they can't fully move off Flash).

I thought the only reason YouTube hasn't isn't fully supporting HTML5 was ads. Afaik, YouTube doesn't use any DRM whatsoever.

Apparently they use it for movies and other proprietary content:

http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

Adobe might help with the sandboxing of flash. Google could also be planning to use flash to help drive adoption of WebM.

"The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one."

I would think that someone as high profile as John Resig could get one pretty easily. (actually he did! I mean without filling out the same form as "normal" people) Maybe it shows that he's too humble to ask for one directly...

" I’d love to be able to have access to a shell and the ability to install vim + screen + git + a web server"

I can't help thinking thats beside the point and exactly what google are not designing this for.

I think that point is that, like with the iPhone, people want the ability to 'flip a switch' to be able to go beyond the 'canned' experience. Apple wants to force you to only stay within the canned experience, but I would expect a little more from Google. Sure it's not what they are designing it for, but I don't necessarily think that people are expecting support for these actions from Google.

When the first Cr-48 reviews popped up, I had exactly this question: "What kind of setup would you want for development?" (Or maybe writing papers in TeX.) ymacs seems like a good start for a web-based editor, but it is useless without filesystem support (C-x C-f directly to Dropbox?) Without ssh'ing into a home box somewhere, I'm not sure what the cloud-based compile/execute/debug development model is supposed to be.

Any other ideas what development should look like in the idea cloud-based world?

Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G. I would use that laptop until the end of time.

I just replaced the HD on my 13" Macbook with an SSD, but I haven't seen anything about replacing the DVD with a battery. I do have an external laptop battery with a home made magsafe connector and a portable 4G hotspot. I suspect that this setup is only going to last about a year or so longer, though.

You cannot replace the optical with battery on MBPs. I know older Thinkpads had that ability, but I haven't checked any of the new ones. Regardless, Lenovo seems to be dropping all the funky/awesome Thinkpad accessories from their site.

You can still do this with many of the newest Thinkpads. They call it the "Ultrabay". Example: http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...

You could replace the floppy drive with a second battery pack on the PowerBook 5x0, in 1994. OK, I know this is useless trivia but I still have one :)

As someone who spends a lot of time doing UI dev work, I need to open up photoshop and cut up PSDs into CSS quite a bit..

The ability to run a terminal and local PHP or Django are also biggies, but other than that I don't need much of an OS. Everything else I use on a day to day basis is cloud based anyhow

Eagerly awaiting the day I can break free of the desktop os for good

Still waiting for mine. I knew I should have used John Resig as my alias!

Too bad about the terminal and *nix tools. I guess I'll have to use something like Cloud9 IDE to code. I'm really looking forward to the free 3g, though. That and the old black macbook feel.

I love the idea of mapping caps lock to ctrl + t to make it a new tab button my normal boring laptop. I'm currently looking for an app which will allow that, or a Chrome extension which allows this - anyone have an idea?

On windows you could use Autohotkey to do just that. I'm about to do that just now ;-)

Is Google re-selling the 3G service from another carrier? Didn't realize they were getting into the wireless provider business with this.

The 3G is provided by Verizon on this device.

Although I appreciate Google's efforts to provide it, I am NOT a fan of Flash. Is the a way to turn it off in Chrome OS?

I believe you can disable it in about:plugins

Thanks!

Same as in chrome, just go to chrome://plugins

How do you verify that your code behaves correctly in different browsers when developing in JavaScript on Chrome OS?

Unit tests! :)

tl;dr i want a macbook air and this isn't it

Does Eclipse run on Chrome? No Eclipse, no coding...

Wow. Lack of SSH niceties like keys must be painful.

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