Chromebook Pixel

I’m writing this blog post on a Chromebook Pixel. In Emacs. On Ubuntu, as a chroot, thanks to crouton.

Why do I have a Chromebook Pixel? Google gave one to every Google I/O 2013 attendee.¹

Although I was happy to get such a cool new gadget, I honestly wasn’t sure what I’d do with the thing. I really like my MacBook Pro Retina and wasn’t looking for an alternative. Also, although I love web apps and 45% of my day is in the web browser, another 45% is in Emacs using Racket — what about that?

Then I remembered you can run Linux on a Chromebook. Well, it’s already running Linux; that’s what ChromeOS is built on. For “real” Linux, you have a choice:

1. Dual boot ChromeOS and Linux.

2. Use chroot to run some other Linux userland on top of the ChromeOS’ Linux kernel.

The advantage of the latter is that you can still run ChromeOS, and hit hotkeys to flip between it and the “real” Linux desktop.

NOTE: In the rest of this blog post, keep in mind that my Linux experience has been limited to command-line environments like Amazon Linux on EC2. My entire GUI desktop Linux experience consists of using Ubuntu on the Chromebook Pixel for the last 2 days. So if I write something stupid, keep that in mind and feel free to chime in with a nice comment below. ;)

Installing

1. Put the Chromebook into developer mode.² ~15 minutes.

2. Download and install crouton. ~30 minutes.

3. Configure Ubuntu to deal with the Chromebook Pixel’s insanely high DPI.

Emacs

As I write this, the newest Emacs available from apt-get is 23.3. On OS X, I’d grown used to 24.2, including its package manager. Otherwise, a simple git clone of my .emacs.d tree got everything working quickly.

I realize it’s possible to build a newer Emacs. Just haven’t gotten to that.

Racket

The Linux x86_64 (Debian squeeze) build of Racket works great. The only issues I encountered were the following:

DrRacket

Just crank the font size up CTRL + a few notches. Bad news: Some UI elements like toolbar buttons will remain tiny. Good news: The main text in the editor is rendered cripsly (unlike on the MacBook Pro Retina display where it’s some 4x4 sub-pixel affair).

send-url (and DrRacket help)

By default, send-url from net/sendurl doesn’t know how to start a browser. If it used reasonable-browser or xdg-open I think it would work. It looks like it’s possible to deal with this by changing the external-browser parameter. For example, here’s a quick hack I put in my local build of Frog to get its preview feature working:

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  ;; This is a bit of a hack: If `preview` fails on Linux, try again
  ;; using the "sensible-browser" command.
  (with-handlers ([exn:fail?
                   (lambda (exn)
                     (match (system-type 'os)
                       ['unix
                        (parameterize ([external-browser '("sensible-browser " . "")])
                          (preview))]
                       [_ (eprintf "~a" (exn-message exn))]))])
    (preview))

This is not necessarily the right way to handle this; I might not even commit this code.

Also, this doesn’t fix DrRacket knowing how to start a browser to show documentation.

CIRC

When I searched the Chome store for “IRC”, strangely it did not show me CIRC. Fortunately I found it from regular Google search. Very nifty IRC client. Not as featureful as something like Colloqy on OS X, but neat. Of course if you want to run IRC on the Ubuntu chroot instead of the main ChromeOS, there are the usual choices.

Prognosis?

I spent a couple decades using DOS and then Windows. Only in the last few years have I seriously used OS X full-time, and used command-line Linux on EC2 instances. I’ve wanted to try a GUI Linux. Also, as I’ve grown grumpy lately about Apple and Google wanting to put us into AOL era walled gardens, I’ve thought more about using Linux as my main OS.

But I love laptops. And I hate screwing around with drivers. And I really hate laptops where things like wi-fi, power management, and the touch pad don’t really work correctly. So I’ve never wanted to go down that road of finding some specific ThinkPad model from 2007, spending a week futzing with drivers, and spending years with the thing never quite working right. At least that’s the impression I get everytime I research this. I won’t get a hobbyist’s enjoyment from tinkering with the basic damn hardware functionality of my main working machine. I need it to work, so I can focus on the kind of tinkering I do like.

So as far as I could tell, I’d probably never go down that road. And yet, hello, Chromebook Pixel. So far, it just-works the way I would want a Linux laptop to just-work. With a screen that’s even more beautiful than the MacBook Pro Retina (and, although it’s more of a novelty, for me, it’s a flipping touch screen). This thing is sweet.

The irony is that this laptop is from Google, who I mentioned above is one of the reasons why I was interested in moving to Linux. Plus, it’s Google, which means in 2 years will the whole thing get kicked to the curb like Reader and the latest round of open standards? Even if ChromeOS survives, this weird and wondeful Pixel-class Chromebook might not. It feels like something for early-adopter developers, a happy accident that will get cleaned up someday in an orgy of strategory changing and focusing. I hope I’m wrong. I hope this hot mess survives.