Ok, so I’ve actually been using the notebook for about 6 days now, trying to do all of my web usage on it, although the last post was not written on it, as I did most of the writing before I had the notebook setup! So, I have been using it, as I said and here are some observations:
- The keyboard is non-standard, no function keys, no delete, home, end, page down, page up. (almost a good thing, I need my home, end, page up/down keys!)
- The touchpad is humongous! I frequently find myself resting my palm on it, or dragging 3 or 4 fingers across it. (too much of a good thing)
- There are no touchpad buttons, click anywhere (works best near the bottom) for left click and two-finger click for a right click. (very cool, multitouch touchpad, needs more features to utilize this capability however)
- The touch is hyper sensitive, you almost do not even need to touch it for the notebook to process the touch. (again, too much of a good thing)
- The keyboard has plenty of spacing between keys, so make sure you either watch where your fingers are going, or are a good typer, else you will hit wrong keys. (this is a good thing)
- No internal moving parts. (this is a very good thing)
- Minimal heat, located in the center, towards the hinge on the bottom side. (another good thing)
- An ambient light sensor that makes (at least my screen) the display auto adjust the brightness, way too often if you have only back lighting in the room. (too much of a good thing)
- Some pretty darn good battery life, I can use it non-stop on wifi for 6 hours without killing the battery. (very good thing)
- No support from Netflix or Skype, these two need to get on the ball, and google needs to start rolling it. (a very not good thing for a “web centered user”)
update — sweet, found my home and end button shortcuts! ctrl+alt+up/down arrow will give you home and end, but putting left and/or right in that equation did not page me… just need to find those shortcuts I guess (or head over to Google’s website and read up on it 
yup, it is all there, I must have missed the tabs on the left side to select different types of shortcuts, I only saw the browser ones when I visited that page last… it would appear that pressing ctrl+alt+/ provides an on-screen keyboard shortcut viewer.
one more note… me and this trackpad are gonna fight! two finger clicking for a right click and two finger swiping for scrolling is not working for me. Very happy I found my home/end and page up/down shortcuts, I now should not need to use the touch pad to scroll ever again! now to find another way to right click… I think for web browsing there is a shortcut for open in a new tab (ctrl+click) and ctrl+c/x/v give me cut copy and paste, so I think I can work around the 2 fingered touchpad of death.
While there are blizzards going on in some parts of the country, it is 70 degrees and sunny here in South Carolina. I have the back door open, the windows opened, and I was in the kitchen making a fresh pot of coffee at about 1:34pm when this occurred…
Knock Knock…
Who’s there?
UPS.
UPS who?
UPS is at your door with a Chrome OS notebook, come get it or I’m taking it home!
This is how my afternoon started…
December 7th 2010 I caught this post over at ZDNet…
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/google-debuts-first-chrome-os-based-laptop-the-cr-48/20552
I followed the link and signed up as an individual, not a business. I have not heard a think since I submitted the application (nothing new, I’ve never won anything in my life, except contests where everyone wins…) So let me say the first thing that came out of my mouth when I started opening the package was “Damn, I think I just shit my pants.”
Below are pictures I have taken of the packaging and contents, and some videos of turning the notebook on (which by the way I did not have to hit the power button like the instructions said).
I have noticed so far that if you let it sit after 1-3 minutes the display dims, then after 1 or 2 more minutes it goes to sleep., but about the time when the screen dims, but has not yet done so, if you try to move the mouse there is a second or two before it responds, as if it is setup to allow the touchpad to be shut down to conserve power.
A quick overview of the startup, which you can watch on the videos…
I took it out of the box, popped the battery in, flipped it open and the Chrome logo was on the screen by the time I had it open all the way. The first message was to connect to my network, then it checked for updates, spent a good 10 minutes updating (wifi N (if it used it) and a 15MB down 4MB up internet connection). After the update it rebooted and I went to log in again, but it had forgotten my network passkey… which is when it displayed a popup that offline mode failed. I re-entered my passkey and it was back online right away (there was an option for verizon wireless, but I did not want to activate that yet, as it is only 100MB per month for free, for 24 months though! With an option for $9.99 unlimited per day…).
videos are now available, I’ll apologize in advance for the quality, I am not a video editor, nor do I have video equipment, but there are just somethings that pictures and words can not adequately portray.
I apparently have forgotten how to embed the videos, will resolve this shortly.
VIDEO 1
VIDEO 2
VIDEO 3
VIDEO 4
VIDEO 5
VIDEO 6
VIDEO 7
VIDEO 8
just want to get this started as I hope it will motivate me to finish it, since I have done a LOT of things on my computer since my last post, and obviously I have posted none of it.
So, I got a little impatient about not having my PC functioning, so I I installed Fedora 12 x64 on the rest of my FreeBSD boot drive and I have about 80% of the things on my list done and working. I’ll reference them by numbers here, and you can go read what they were by clicking on “my list” above. I am still hoping to get FreeBSD as my host OS; however everything is working right now with Fedora (except that stupid wireless NIC), although I am still having my “system reached critical temp” error from ACPI, yet the system resource monitor I have running shows a nice pleasant 30C CONSTANT temp. maybe this summer I’ll pickup a liquid CPU cooler… I already have 5 exhaust fans and 2 intake fans, 2 x 240mm exhaust and a 160mm or 180mm intake, I think I have air flow covered. (talked to a friend who is more into the details of technical issues, a network engineer, and he says that an inactive CPU, like when the system shutsdown, can drop 40F in about 7-10 seconds so it might be why I cannot catch it reporting a high temp in the BIOS) The BIOS does not report any temps reaching above 45C ever, so I have no idea why this is happening, I do run widgets reporting the internal temp, but have never seen it change!!!) . most of the time when it shuts there is/has been high CPU/disk IO usage (all 4 cores over 60% sustained, multiple long term large/multiple file movements across drives and/or multiple VMs running). So it could be valid.
I have come up with a couple of things to try to resolve this issue (going with the cheapest first, even if it is not really going to help a CPU issue, it can’t hurt…)
- I could just upgrade some hardware and see if a different BIOS/MB manufacturer makes a difference. I would love a lower watt CPU (or 6 core!), more L2/L3 cache, and USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s, since my current system bottleneck is the SATA 3GB/s HDDs.
- Switch to liquid cooling and installing a new thermal sensor with an external readout.
- buy cute little 5cfm coolling fans to place on my NorthBridge, SouthBridge, and onboard GPU passive cooling fins (cheapest option, not necessarily attacking the actual issue though)
- purchase a pretty new Video card and disable the onboard video (the chip is within an inch or two from the CPU, so there maybe some issue with residual heat from the GPU causing my overheating).
in order from cheapest to most expensive would be 3, 2, 4/1 (really close and might be a tie or within a $20-$30)
My List of things to get working, except this one is for Fedora.
1. VirtualBox is installed, working and I have multiple VMs up and running.
2. Install VMWare Workstation, I have downloaded the newest trial version and it is good for another 3 weeks, but have not gotten around to installing it.
3. Mounting my NTFS drives, all mounted, where I want them, even went through and deleted the Windows OS system folders from all but one.
4. SSH connections, I have started this and was working on it when I decided to start this post, should be done tomorrow.
5. I am posting this from Google Chrome on my Fedora 12 installation right now, so I’d say installed and working. Java shows up in the plugins, although java.com cannot detect it in my browser.
6. Hulu works great in Firefox or Google Chrome, although is a bit spotty when I have VMs running, and the playback is laggy in Chrome… So I am trying to get the Hulu Desktop app running. will make a post after I get some work done on it and let you know how it goes.
7. So far everything is working great, going to try a couple of VM’ed games next week after I get the rest of this done.
8. Firefox is up, running, and is playing hulu; however it does not report Java as installed from the about:plugins page, even though it is and I followed all the steps to link the correct files to the correct places. I believe this is the Firefox 3.6 doesn’t support Java issue though and not an issue on my part.
9. access NTFS drives remotely via ssh and a chrooted account with links to the mounts. After I get my SSH working tomorrow I should be able to test this. I was reading something online I no longer have open and may not have bookmarked that said that I can double mount drives (mount a drive to more than one, specifically 2, locations)
10. convert my NTFS drives to a more suitable linux FS, this again is a last thing item, to be done after everything else is working.
11. convert my drives from MBR to GPT, most likely to be done at the same time as the FS change.
12. GUI package manager for KDE, done, comes with Fedora.
13. eliminate all traces of Gnome from my computer… again, have to be last thing, once all is up and working.
14. build my first kernel, normally done immediately after install, I’ll do it last after EVERYTHING else (including the other things I said I would do last)
15. Wine is installed and works. will try out some things that I have installed in VMs to see about dropping those VMs
16. install older apps, again part of a couple of other items, I will of course be installing older apps on older OS installation I have, and will try them in Wine as stated.
17. X.org port forwarding to Cygwin on a windows machine (laptop) something I might do in a week or two…
18. start regular backups… I’m getting there, I have the drive formated in ext3, I just have not started backing things up.
19. Java, I think it works in Chrome, I was able to see the animated maps on the NOAA website, which most people use to test their Java. not working in Firefox 3.5.9.2
20. Flash, Hulu is working in Firefox and Chrome, so all good here.
21. Yakuake is fully functional and working.
22. Picasa 3.6 (I think) is installed and working great, except I don’t seem to be able to find the facial recognician system.
23. No idea on this one, can not find where I posted what it was, only that it was completed on BSD.
Unfinished items for Fedora: 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 19?
apparently Open Office will not load, for an unknown reason, looking into it at this time.
start off with some non-techie stuff first…
I head back to see my surgeon next Monday, where he will tell me that in another week or two I should start putting some weight on my leg (toe touch, or partial weight bearing?) when at my PT. I am also hoping he will tell me it is okay to get my incision wet, as it has been making it very difficult to take showers!
ok, on to the good stuff.
So, I am not at home and do not have my desktop machine available for use for the last week, I have been going through withdrawal… but having to work on someone else’s machine, and my wife’s laptop (I think I mentioned before, I gave her mine, and sold her old one) has taught me one important lesson, why I prefer Linux.
My number one reason for preferring Linux over Windows is system maintenance. What do I mean? well, I mean keeping everything up to date, this latest round of Adobe patching should make this make sense to everyone. I don’t use Acrobat on my Linux machines for this reason. However; back to the point, when I need to check for updates on my Linux machine I open Yakuake with a quick hit of F12 and type “sudo yum update” and it comes back and tells me every single thing installed on my system that has an update available, period, end of statement. On windows, I have to launch 5-8 different apps, find their “check for updates” button/link and wait for the results (I have learned by doing this that OpenOffice.org does not notify you of a new version being released, only if there are updates for your version. example, I have 3.1 installed, and 3.2 is now available. clicking the check for updates menu option tells my “There are no available updates for this version” (maybe not word for word, but that is just about what it says). I run windows update, Acrobat Update, Java update, Picasa update, Chrome update, Firefox update, and on and on… (yes I know there is an Adobe Updater, but I don’t know how to initiate it in Windows, and never cared enough to look it up, but now that I have mentioned it I sure I found instructions and have put a link to them here).
Simple and easy to manage, most distros even let you run their package manager and it has a button to click to check for updates for your system, making it easier and more time consuming all at once to do the same thing. (Yakuake is always running and it takes me about 1.5 seconds to type that line into the terminal, it takes a lot longer to load the package manager from the application menu and then click the check for updates button, but you don’t have to type that way!)
The actual GUI interface for Windows an Linux and even MAC are so similar these days, that I don’t care which I am using as far as that is concerned. I have come to the understanding that there will always be applications/games for an OS, other than the one I am using, that I want to use/play (take iPhone for example, they have the best Air Traffic Controller game I have played, and I’ve hunted those down and played quite a number of them, but I don’t own anything made by Apple, and probably won’t ever, unless the 2nd gen iPad totally rocks… but I will be getting an Android Tablet this year (possibly the Notion Ink Adam, or the HTC Google Chrome OS tablet), so I still probably won’t get an iPad). My concern at this point, as I spend more and more time as a Unix Admin is maintenance. The system I use at home needs to be practically maint free, as most Linux and Unix machines are, they will run for years without being touched by an admin, the best I know of are an AIX Server and a OpenVMS server, the AIX server has been running since 1991 and has never been patched, updated, reconfigured, or messed with in any way. It is setup to contact a NIM server for logins, so no new users have ever been added to it, it has never crashed, never lost power, never been rebooted. That to me is the greatest achievement of humankind (in technology anyways, and some of these companies need to take a look at the AIX OS and learn something from it!!!). The other machine, the OpenVMS machine has been running since before 1994, but has not been patched, never been upgraded, never been rebooted, since 1994. now I know next to nothing about OpenVMS, and have not personally logged into the machine itself, but a friend and co-worker of mine used to be the sole admin for the OpenVMS machines at that company and although that one is the only one like this, it is still running today without interference from humans. I am sure some other machines are out there doing the same, but these are two that I know. The longest Windows Server I have heard of running without rebooting or crashing was about 2.5 – 3 years, after which the hardware components in the server failed and the machine was replaced. Some people have told me about Windows servers being up for 4 years and then being restarted by some new guy, but I have no validation of it and they could not give me a more exact time frame.
not sure if I made a compelling argument or not, but I need some medication and to go prop my leg up, so I am done here. Also expecting UPS sooner or later for an over night supersave shipment… and it takes me 5 mins to get downstairs… :)
- New blog post... Diablo III closed Beta http://t.co/dKC2ChWm
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- New blog post... Computer upgrades http://t.co/6PWVNy4m
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- New blog post... Netflix Down? http://bit.ly/q74Svu
