Jeff Epler's blog

Got A Chromebook

I have been wanting a travel computer lighter than my 15" laptop but more capable than my Nexus 7 combined with a bluetooth keyboard. And, frankly, I had just had gadget envy for the Samsung ARM Chromebook since it was announced.

When I'm on the go, my needs are basically:

Modern web browser with adblock and greasemonkey
A ssh (or, better yet, mosh) client
A comfortable keyboard
Fairly light

In particular, some things I didn't need are

Hundreds of GB of local storage
Four or eight cores of computing power
Full compatibility with desktop Linux or x86

I felt it would be nice to have

Long battery life
Ability to install Linux or customized ChromiumOS if I decided I needed it
Inexpensive enough to buy without being 100% sure it'll meet my needs

From my experience with Chromium-browser on Debian, I know that Chrome is an adequate web browser with Adblock, Ghostery, and TamperMonkey (though it's not 100% identical in function to Firefox), and I was aware of ssh apps for it. I also tried out the Samsung's keyboard at a local Best Buy and found it adequate. So when Amazon had them for $230 last week, I decided to treat myself.

I've now had the device for a few days, and it's been a positive adventure.

I immediately placed the device in developer mode and installed debian wheezy via crouton, but I'm not presently using anything in my debian chroot. For a short time, I used Secure Shell to ssh to the wheezy chroot and run mosh there.

I found that after a few customizations, mosh-chrome is a pefectly adequate mosh client. After I resolved a problem building it, I customized the colors to match my rxvt, added the ability to send a remote command, and hardcoded my default connection settings. However, on at least two occasions, mosh-chrome has failed to resume its session after suspending and changing wireless networks, so I'm not sure it's as reliable as desktop mosh.

Other thoughts:

I had to rewrite one of my private GreaseMonkey scripts to work in TamperMonkey.
Adblock and ghostery both seem to work adequately on the ChromeBook.
I do miss having a compose key.
I wish there was a SIP client I could use with callcentric, but I haven't found one yet.
I haven't had a chance to assess the battery lifetime yet.
Emacs users rejoice, you can map the "search" key (in the position of "caps lock" on a standard PC keyboard) to Control.

New hardware

I'm in the process of setting up a new machine to be a home server. I'll include more boring details about this here. Trust me, it's pretty dry reading.

30+ years of computers

During some downtime, I made a list of all the computers I could remember owning. The list is surprisingly long, and goes back to 1992 (before which I had a Commodore 64 but that barely counts, does it?) When I originally wrote this article in 2012 I came up with 10 desktops and 7 laptops, or a new machine nearly every year. By contrast, in 2020 I'm using a 7 year old laptop and it's fine. On the other hand, the 3 Chromebooks I bought in the last 6 years just didn't last.

Still in use as of June 2021: Dell 5155, Dell 3190, Ryzen 3700X, i7-4790k

Linux RAID Misdetection (and fix)

Earlier this year, I began using a setup with LVM inside of a RAID5. RAID5 gets me 2TB of storage from 3 1TB drives, with redundancy in the case of the failure of a single disk, while LVM gets me the ability to allocate and resize individual filesystems at will. However, I had a problem that prevented my system from booting unattended, which became a big problem when there was a storm-related power failure while I was out of town.

qq: quick & dirty terminal

qq is a quick and dirty terminal application for beagleboard. It's written in Python and requires python-serial. I didn't like cu (no CLOCAL that I could find) or minicom (terminal emulation, keyboard shortcuts and configuration got in the way of real work)

Except for tilde-specials (similar to rsh, ssh and cu), qq just copies data between the local terminal and the given tty. Two tilde specials are defined:

    <CR>~.: quit
    <CR>~b: send break (useful for "alt-sysrq" actions on beagleboard)

Files currently attached to this page:

4.0kB

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

New hardware

Last week my GIGABYTE GA-M51GM-S2G-based system bit the dust (capacitor plague?). I'll be updating this blog entry through the weekend with progress setting up the replacement hardware, which arrived Friday.

DAT-160 USB tape drive on Linux

I recently decided to replace my DLT-IV backup system with DAT-160, mostly because of the greater capacity (80GB native vs 35GB native). I wasn't able to find a lot of information online about Linux compatability, but I took the plunge and bought Quantum's CD160UH-SST, an internal USB tape drive.

New Laptop

I recently got a Dell D830 laptop. I'm reasonably satisfied with it so far. Read the link for more of my impressions.