happy hardware review: Samsung Chromebook

For the past two months, my primary laptop has been a Chromebook! The little $249 Samsung ARM one.

I'm really enjoying it, for a number of reasons. First off, you can do quite a few things from ChromeOS -- it's really surprising how much time we spend in a browser these days. ChromeOS is lovely and simple and it pretty much Just Works.

But the thing that makes it really work for me is Crouton, the semi-official way to run Ubuntu alongside ChromeOS, from champion Googler David Schneider. It's really really easy to install. You just put your Chromebook in developer mode, which gives you a shell in ChromeOS, then you run the crouton shell script, and it sets up a really minimal Ubuntu, with XFCE by default. It is exactly what you (or at least I) want. Once that's set up, it's a quick key combination to switch between ChromeOS and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu runs in a chroot, but by default your user's Downloads directory is shared with ChromeOS, which is brilliant.

The hardware is lovely, especially considering the price. It's so slim, and it feels pretty well built. And it fits in my tiny running-style backpack. The keyboard is pleasantly clicky in the way a chiclet keyboard can be. My one complaint about the hardware is that the button built into the trackpad sometimes sticks, but it seems to be doing that less and less -- maybe it just has to get broken in.

But here's the biggest thing: the battery lasts roughly forever. I'll carry it around all day, work on it for hours in a coffee shop, and I've still got plenty of battery left. It gets at least six hours.

So if what you want is a little laptop with a nice keyboard and long battery life that makes it easy to run a proper Linux (in addition to the bells-and-whistles ChromeOS things)... you could do a lot worse than the Samsung Chromebook.

happy hardware review: usb wireless adapter from ThinkPenguin

I'm in Mountain View for the summer, working on Google Translate for another internship with that company that I seem to work for fairly often. Hooray!

Unfortunately, my laptop's built-in wireless card really doesn't agree with the apartment complex's wireless. So I ordered a little USB stick wireless adapter from ThinkPenguin, and it came pretty quickly, and I plugged it in (and told wicd to look at wlan1 instead of wlan0), and it just worked! Now my wireless connection is pretty fast, and doesn't drop every five minutes! (unlike before; it was a serious pain.)

Particularly, I got this one. Their other products may also be lovely. Thanks, ThinkPenguin!

nice wireless card for Ubuntu: TP-Link TL-WN651G

I just got my TP-Link TL-WN651G wireless card, popped it in the computer, and it Just Worked. (Ubuntu Karmic, 9.10).

It uses the Atheros chipset (Atheros AR5001X+), and Ubuntu figures it right out, with the ath5k wireless driver.

So if you're looking for an inexpensive PCI wireless card that you can use on Linux without using a binary blob and ndiswrapper, this is a good choice!

Hooray :)

More Ubuntu: getting the NetworkManager Applet back

Ubuntu comes with this really great network selection applet that sits on your gnome panel. It's called the NetworkManager applet, and it looks and acts more or less like the analogous dropdown menu on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, if you remove it from your panel, it's unintuitive how to get it back.

Maybe you accidentally removed it, and then, after some research, tried "nm-applet" from the command line, messed with the Network Monitor and the Network Connections preference page, and even tried editing nm-system-settings.conf.

What you really want to do is right click on your panel, click Add to Panel, and select Notification Area. Why the nice NetworkManager Applet and battery status applet both live in the Notification Area remains a mystery.

Like so:

Why your Ubuntu Netbook Remix windows are maximized all the time

I was curious why my windows were all immediately getting maximized on my new kinda-netbook Dell Mini 12, running UNR (with the "Classic Desktop" mode). It's the sort of behavior you can imagine wanting -- with a small screen, maybe you do want to maximize everything? But I wanted to turn it off.

This thread has the answer!

UNR comes with a program called "Maximus", which was in my Startup Applications. To make the behavior go away, just go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and remove Maximus from that list. Problem solved!

Seems odd that this is a process running in the background, instead of, say, a window manager setting.

back from Google I/O, got a new laptop!

I can speak for myself, at least, in saying that it felt pretty darn good to be on the GWT team for Google I/O. The Google Wave demo at the keynote got a standing ovation, and they made a pretty big deal about how they used GWT and it was a wonderful tool for their work. Pretty fantastic. A standing ovation at a tech conference. Totally electric.

Anyway! I got back, and my Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu preinstalled had arrived! It's really pretty. The keyboard is a little more cramped than I'd expected (especially with the punctuation keys) but it's got a nice clicky feel. I'm not super-impressed with the Ubuntu version Dell shipped -- it's a specialized distribution of Hardy (last year's version) with some Dell and Yahoo-specific goodies. But the built-in camera and suspend/resume work beautifully! And no Microsoft tax! Not bad, really!

I'm probably about to install a fresh new (9.04) Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it.

Update! There's a bit of a funky driver issue with running the stock Ubuntu instead of the one Dell provides, but it's very surmountable. Here's how to install Ubuntu "Jaunty" on your Dell Mini 12.