Chromebook survival guide for linux nodejs developers

Why did i move to chromebook?

Well, basically curiosity, and my quest for:

• I work with google chrome 24/7
• I would love using it 12hr without power
• I wanted an easypeasy stable linux environment with minimal gui
• I prefer letting the Chromium/Google-team take care of updates/security etc.

But most importantly:

• In the last years i found myself spending most of my time with terminal/websites/webapps/android apps

I googled/youtubed people who were running dockers and ubuntu in a chroot, so i figured there’s plenty room for desktop apps if needed.

This took me 5 mins after I got my chromebook:

• put the chromebook in developer mode
• i bought a tiny 64GB pendrive for crouton chroot-backups and large files
• i installed my dotfiles,vim, and nvm in my ubuntu xenial chroot created by crouton

Ok..it wasn’t exactly 5 minutes ;)

Boom! I was amazed to see that I could continue working on my projects already!

After some days:

What did i tweak after receiving my acer chromebook 14?

What i love so far

• the desktop environment is very minimal, smooth and slick
• alt-shift-m: the filemanager is pretty nice, and allows adding cloudstorage integration (i have a 1TB webdav STACK-account at transip)
• ctrl-shift-F5/cascade: take screenshot region to paste into slack
• shift-search-l: suspend laptop without closing the lid
• most important keyboard shortcut: CTRL-ALT-? (shows all shortcuts)
• extension: nimbus screencapture easy peasy screencasts to paste into slack
• extension: the great suspender (never get out of tabs)
• the microphone: recording screencasts works very well out of the box, also in crouton/X11
• the speaker: very clean, clear loud sound
• switching linux/chrome desktop: ctrl-shift-f1 and ctrl-shift-f2 switches desktops backward/forward (f1=backward & f2=forward key)

What I tried/used to use, but abandoned

What I didn’t try yet

running docker using RKT

Aliases

Im using these alias in my ~/.bashrc for crosh:

alias ubuntu="sudo enter-chroot"
alias startx="sudo enter-chroot xinit"
alias enable_playstore="sudo bash ~/Downloads/enable_playstore"
# cpu-friendly cp for big files
alias cp="bash ~/Downloads/cp.sh"

Awesome javascript editor: Caret-T

UPDATE: I’m using the ‘sources’-tab in chrome devtools as my main editor now (see snapshot below). It integrates perfectly with the Crosh (crouton) shell:

Before that, I tried this chrome app which has intelli-sense

I realized the codecompletion works ultrafast in(side) chrome for obvious reasons :D

Make sure you mount the chroot filesystem in your filemanager as shown in the video, or (ultimately) store all your sourcecode on an tiny usbstick.

Terminal tweaks?

• I installed this beautiful terminal font & colors-scheme
• I figured out how to set terminal titles as tab titles

Vim tweaks

Some chrome-shortcuts (Ctrl-w) conflicted with my VIM settings. Therefore i made these changes to ~/vim/vimrc, to make things comfortable:

	" chromebook fix: crouton/ubuntu hints vim to use latin
	set encoding=utf8

	" chromebook: switch windows with alt-arrowkeys instead of ctrl-w
	nmap \ <C-w>w
	nmap \| :tabnew:<CR>
	nmap [ :tabp<CR>
	nmap ] :tabn<CR>

	" save on ctrl-s
	noremap <silent> <C-S>          :update<CR>
	vnoremap <silent> <C-S>         <C-C>:update<CR>
	inoremap <silent> <C-S>         <C-O>:update<CR>

ctrl-w (switch buffer) became a dangerous shortcut, it abruptly closes the chrome tab including terminal and vim :D

Tweak for transferring big files (prevents cpu hogs)

Sometimes I download movies from streaming moviesites (for travelling/offline purposes etc). Somehow using cp caused cpu spikes (MMC storage related?), but i solved that with this script:

#!/bin/bash
# makes transferring big files cpu-friendly on chromebook
#
# usage:
#
#   put this script into ~/Downloads/cp.sh and put this in your ~/.bashrc :
#
#     alias cp='bash ~/Downloads/cp.sh'
#
[[ ! -n $1 ]] && { /bin/cp; exit 0; }
FILESIZE=$(( $( stat -c '%s' "$1" ) / 1024 / 1024 ))
if [[ $FILESIZE -lt 50 ]]; then
  /bin/cp "$@"
else
  nice -n 20 ionice -c 3 /bin/cp "$@"
fi

Voila, this will automatically apply nice and ionice to the cp command (when files are bigger than 50MB). You could apply the same technique to other cpu-heavy commands.

HINT: also do this in your crouton chroots

My /etc/rc.local

Crouton loads /etc/rc.local upon launch, which allows me to trigger these badboys:

# allow linux apps to use ALSA
chmod a+rw /dev/snd/seq

# allow lots of open inodes (webpack/gulp/nodemon etc)
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=1048576

# uncomment this to disable ssh
#mkdir -p -m0755 /var/run/sshd
#/usr/sbin/sshd

# allow incoming traffic to ports (handy to test webdev on smartphone etc)
/sbin/iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT

# remount so that usb has exec access
mount -o remount,exec,noatime /media/removable/data

# start cron
exec cron

Middleclick paste for xterm on chromebook crouton X11 chroot

I rewired ‘shift-backspace’ to paste in xterm, by putting this script into middleclick.sh:

#!/bin/bash
xdotool mousedown --clearmodifiers 2
xdotool mouseup 2
xdotool keyup alt
xdotool keyup ctrl
xdotool keyup shift

And invoking it using this .xbindkeysrc file in my homedir:

"/home/sqz/bin/middleclick"
    Shift + BackSpace

Running android apps

UPDATE: these days you don’t need this, you can just enable the beta-channel and the playstore pops up

I was able to get android apps quickly up and running by putting this script in Downloads/enable_playstore.sh:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $(whoami) == "root" ]]; then
  #echo '--enable-arc' > /usr/local/chrome_dev.conf
  echo '--arc-availability=officially-supported' > /usr/local/chrome_dev.conf
  mount -o bind /usr/local/chrome_dev.conf /etc/chrome_dev.conf
  echo now press ctrl-shift-qq and the playstore should show up
else
  echo "must be root"
fi

I didn’t make this a permanent change, as i would like the OS to keep receiving its updates. Also, most applications i use on android, also have a web- or chrome app variant (skype etc).