An update after a long, long time. :) This was a little red panda in the new River Safari portion of the Singapore Zoo.

There are about ten bajillion posts out there commenting on how easy it is to do this and it is indeed incredibly easy, especially if you already have a linux machine running ubuntu. If you don’t, just get a live CD or use something like portable ubuntu or andlinux or use a virtual machine. (Which leads to a very Inception-like situation of a virtual machine within a virtual machine.)

Me, I SSHed into my workstation in lab and used remote x to handle all of this. The advantage of this method, as opposed to only using the linux partition, is that I can download the ubuntu ISO much much faster, and the processing power on that machine is way better than my laptop.

I followed Google’s instructions. And then I used this guide to help make the trackpad and keyboard more usable.

And voila – a tiny, light ubuntu laptop with built in SD-card reader (to upload the many photos that I’ll take) with great battery power!

Google’s pretty awesome in that they’ve actually provided instructions on how to get into developer mode, from which you can flash your own custom OS, if you choose to do so. Of course I chose to do so.

Ok, so what else can I do with this thing? Suggestions so far include:
1. Connect my android phone to this thing. Not sure what I’ll do yet.
2. Get bluetooth mouse working because the trackpad is somewhat painful to use if you’re trying to do anything beside point and click.
3. Install Android OS. I’ll try this luigi tool that other blogs have mentioned.

What else should I try with this thing?

Editted to add: Oh My God. I really need to just google “cr-48” more often. Just found a page that taught me how to enable a media player and file browser that will let me use an SD card or USB drive to either save stuff, or to play mp3s and maybe movies. :) Not everything has to be streamed after all!

In other areas… my fat fingers are finally getting used to typing on such a little keyboard (when I use my macbook the keys feel ginormous and seem to have vast expanses between each little chiclet). The trackpad, however, still sucks. This, sadly, is out of the Chrome OS team’s power to change and the least of their problems since there will no doubt be a bajillion different shiny, beautiful devices once this guinea pig phase is complete.

Google’s really trying to push their web app and cloud computing vision, so that’s why I’d imagine they devoted an entire device to it. It’s a proof of concept that you can do pretty much everything you need to from a web browser, especially by using Google provided products.

My new favorite thing on this notebook (it’s far too big to be a netbook, as I called it in my previous post) is the NYTimes chrome app. I had to get used to the idea of chrome apps being nothing more than just glorified links… They’re web apps… so it makes sense to link them to a URL where before you might be linking to some executable in your computer. Anyway, the nytimes chrome version is lovely. I think of all the NYTimes apps I’ve tried, chrome site is my favorite, then iPhone version is 2nd, and Android app is 3rd.

Second useful thing: Read Later Fast. This extension caches copies of webpages so you can read it later. I have grand plans of caching a lot of wikipedia and wikibooks pages…

Oh, I’ve also installed a python shell – where there’s a python shell, I’ll definitely try it out.

BTW, because all this is for Chrome, these apps and extensions work with and are synced to my desktop version of the Chrome browser as well. Pretty neat, because it’s so nice being able to switch to a new computer and still keep the same browser environment.