Toshiba Chromebook 2

I recently decided to purchase a chromebook as I wanted a cheap, portable laptop to browse on and do some casual development on the go. I came across the Toshiba chromebook 2 which had good reviews and was very affordable. I decided to buy the HD version.

I've had it for a few weeks now and here are some quick thoughts on it.

Hardware and specs

The laptop is slim, stylish and relatively lightweight. It is made of silver plastic and does feel a bit on the delicate side but considering the price this is acceptable in my opinion. The battery life is excellent running up to 8-9 hours. The skullcandy tuned sound is surprisingly good and listenable. The 13 inch HD is screen is excellent presenting vivid, sharp video, images and text. Unfortunately the resolution sometimes feel a bit too high as you can find yourself squinting to read text while browsing but this can be easily solved by increasing the text size.

As it is a chromebook it as a has cut-down non-standard keyboard which may initially pose issues (i.e no function keys or home/delete/insert etc.). You do get quickly used to this though. I've not fully explored the ports yet but it includes a USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and HDMI port along with a headphone socket and a SD card reader.

In terms of raw specs, it comes with 4GB RAM, 16GB SSD and an Intel Celeron N2840 CPU. This is more than ample for casual browsing, music, video and CLI based development. One of the features that particularly attracted me to this model is the absence of fans - the cooling is entirely passive. The silence is a welcome change to the constant whines of fans. And you don't have to ever worry about your system overheating due to clogged fan vents.

The 16 GB disk space is very small but I haven't encountered any issues yet as the aim is to have everything stored on the cloud (Google drive).

Chromeos and Crouton

Initially, I wanted to wipe the shipped Chromeos and put a GNU/Linux on it but then came across crouton. This is a way to run GNU/Linux alongside chromeos using the power of chroots (Chromeos is a Linux based OS like Android).

Setting up the crouton is relatively easy but you need to enable developer mode first which gives you access to developer shell. There are plenty of instructions on the net. I recommend starting with the crouton github page. I opted for to run Debian Jessie Xfce as I'm a Debian fanboy. I've not yet fully explored getting i3 running on it but it appears to be possible through some cursory googling.

What is surprising is that I've found myself spending most of my time within Chromeos. It is very usable and just works. I now usually access the crouton through a bash session ("sudo enter-chroot"). This effectively gives me the best of both worlds, I get to be within a user-friendly OS that just works with full access to a full-featured GNU/Linux environment. Kind of like the Mac but a lot cheaper!

There is also a command line SSH client which I frequently use to log into servers. I recommend installing the crosh window extension as the developer terminal that comes with chromeos swallows keypresses like ctrl-n as it runs in the browser. The crosh windows eliminates this.

Areas to improve

Unfortunately the file manager appears rudimentary and you can only access the Downloads folder in your filesystem. You cannot access CIF/Windows shares out of the box or Dropbox without third party extensions (although these are very easy to install). The Openvpn support is also a bit disappointing as the GUI doesn't support ovpn files (you can get around this by using the CLI client and some bash scripting). There also is no rdp client and I have to fire up an X session on my crouton to run the rdesktop application. Hopefully Google will address some of these issues in the future.

Google Play Book Store

I finished reading Dune a few weeks ago which, for those not in the know, is a famous Sci-Fi novel by Frank Herbert published in 1965. It's considered a modern Sci-Fi classic but it's been laying on my reading list for the past 10+ years, until I discovered the Books section on Google Store.

I'm no newcomer to ebooks and have been using FBReader to read free EPUBs downloaded from the net on my PC and Android phones for several years. But the Google Play Book Store completely escaped my notice until recently. When I discovered it, I decided to give it a trial run by purchasing Alex Ferguson's biography which was on sale for £4.30, a quite reasonable price. The purchase process is simple enough, with several payment methods. I chose to pay via my Mobile Network Operator (EE) as it seemed the easiest at the time. I was asked to enter my password and confirm after which the ebook opened automatically. I was impressed. No hoops or complications to jump through at all. Google really has worked on making this as simple as possible and deserves credit. As someone who deals with broken, half-working software systems on a routine basis this was a breath of fresh air.

The ebook itself was of professional quality (no annoying OCR errors) and the Google ebook reader was top-notch too, making the reading experience a pleasant and effortless one. The only feature that I felt was missing was an invert colour option for the late night reading session.*

After devouring Fergie's biography (which I'll probably leave for another post) I decided to explore the Google Play Books library. It is decidedly massive containing pretty much everything on my reading list. I found Dune and decided to make the purchase immediately. To me, the prospect of being able to hop on to any book on my long neglected, creaking reading list is quite exciting.

I'm sure most of us have those certain books that we never got around to reading. Well, now you can, almost anywhere you want. As long as you have an Android phone, which is most phones these days, with a data connection. You don't need a specialist device like a Kindle or even a tablet. Ebooks have long been heralded as a revolutionary medium for literature but I think it may be Google who become the dominant force here by making them truly available and accessible. And this is from someone who has grown increasingly sceptical of the company over their recent antics.

As for Dune, it was everything I expected it to be. Epic and engrossing. Can't wait to dive into the rest of the series. I also now know where George Lucas got his “inspiration” for Star Wars!

* Actually, I just discovered this feature last night along with other display options. It seems I completely missed it. So I have no complaints with the Play Books Reader.

i3 Window Manager

I've been giving the i3 window manager a spin for the last few days after noticing a lot of buzz about it on the webs. I have to say I am very impressed. So impressed I've decided to switch to it from specrwm.

The first thing you notice when you login is that it isn't an ultra-minimalist tiling wm. It comes preconfigured with a status bar which displays some useful system information (no need for Conky) and a system tray at the bottom (no need for trayer). It also has a task bar at at the top (both based on dmenu I believe). It sports some nice, low profile window decorations. It comes with stacked, tabbed and tiling modes which is very handy. It also has a scratchpad facility to keep rarely used windows out of sight (although this wasn't configured by default on Debian Jessie - see below). The config file is simple and easy to understand and the documentation on the site is excellent.

To get the scratchpad, screenlocking and the volume and backlight keys working I added the following to my config file (~/.i3/config):

# Scatchpad - http://build.i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad
# Make the currently focused window a scratchpad
bindsym $mod+Shift+minus move scratchpad

# Show the first scratchpad window
bindsym $mod+minus scratchpad show

# Volume Keys
bindsym  XF86AudioMute exec amixer sset Master toggle
bindsym  XF86AudioLowerVolume exec amixer set Master 5%-
bindsym  XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec amixer set Master 5%+

# Backlight
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec exec xbacklight - 10
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec exec xbacklight + 10

# Lock Screen
bindsym Ctrl+Mod1+l exec xscreensaver-command -lock

I'm still exploring the different options and facilities but I am very impressed on the whole. Time for a screenshot:

Basic Power Management Script

I mentioned previously that I'm back to using the Spectrwm tiling window manager on the laptop. So there I was the other day doing some work on it when suddenly out of the blue the system died. Turns out I hadn't connected it to the power supply and it was running on battery juice. I had also forgotten that lighweight window managers don't come with elaborate power management tools! What to do?

In the past when using Openbox/Fluxbox I remember conscripting the Xfce Power manager to do the job. This time I wanted to script at least some of the essential functionality, myself. So I created a python script to do the job. The script notifies the user (via sound and OSD) when the battery is running low and when the battery drops to critical levels automatically initiates shutdown. Also, it will be put the system into standby if it is running on battery and has been inactive (no user input in X) for a certain defined period.

I wrote it intending to launch it via my .xinitrc script and it utilises the notification daemon so it will only function fully when running inside an X session. I'm using xscreensaver to suspend my screen after a period of inactivity so haven't bothered scripting that facilitiy in. If you want to set this manually you can use xset as described here. Script has been tested to work on my Debian Jessie system but should work on fine on other systemd distros with minimal wrangling.

The script can be found on my github.

Debian Jessie

So, I'm back to Debian Testing (Jessie) on my main laptop. This is the version where they've controversially introduced systemd under the hood. Haven't done much poking around yet but it still feels like good old Debian to me. I remember the Arch switch to systemd being much more painful. I suspect the Debian developers have been hard at work molding systemd to the Debian way of doing thing.

What wasn't a pleasant experience was trying to get the Debian installer to play nice with UEFI. In the end I gave up and just disabled secure boot. Don't know who thought up the whole scheme but it's a pain in the backside. Apart from that the install process was painless

My desktop "environment" is composed of the spectrwm tiling window manager with components yanked from the LXDE desktop (lxterminal, PCManFM, lxappearance etc.). It's probably not to everyone's taste but it works well from my experience: