Ok. I’ve finally done something with the cr-48. I’ve installed ubuntu on it. Why do I do this? It’s not as if I don’t already have a laptop and computer running linux. Well – here comes the exciting bit: In april, I shall be going to India for my friend Balaji’s wedding. To minimize the weight that I’ll be carrying, I’m going to bring the cr-48 instead of one of the macbooks. Because I still need to work on my dissertation, I don’t want to use the shell that comes with Chrome OS in case I don’t have reliable or trustworthy internet sources.
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!
