Episode: 1229
Title: HPR1229: Chromebook Acer C7 Review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1229/hpr1229.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:59:14

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I'm a first time podcaster and a total beginner addict.
I basically only read the hacker public radio page so you want to do a podcast and this
is the result.
Allow me to apologize in advance for all the mistakes that I'm going to make.
If you're bored or irritated, then you can imitate my accent while you listen.
Allow me to mention also that hacker public radio and other podcasts like Linux for
the rest of us always cheer me up and are basically the reason why I got into Linux
about a year ago.
I do not have an engineering or programming background.
Basically if you expect here very in-depth programming knowledge to be shared, then you
will be disappointed.
So after listening to the podcasts for a while and lots of worrying, I finally installed
Ubuntu and found out that it works pretty well and can do everything I need to do.
And a few months ago I even got a Raspberry Pi, played around with it, with the Debian
version, Raspbian and the Arch Linux and liked it very much.
And just recently, while listening to the Linux for the rest of us podcast, I even
pulled a trigger and bought a C7 Chromebook.
I immediately put Ubuntu on it, which is also what I'm recording this on now.
So this podcast is essentially how I am setting up my little Chromebook and I have one particular
problem that I would like to share and how I solved it.
So my little problem is I have currently a Swiss German keyboard layout at work.
At my previous job I had a standard US keyboard and I'm pretty sure that this Chromebook
has now a UK keyboard.
So I needed to find a fast way to switch, first this UK keyboard layout to the Swiss
German.
And then from time to time, I want to change it to the US keyboard because it happens,
you may believe it or not, that some things I just know where they are in the US layout,
better than the Swiss layout.
So if you stick with the Unity desktop, this is not really a problem.
Go to System Settings, cable layout and just add the relevant ones.
You know, I don't dislike Unity, but since I now made a jump to Linux, I usually play with
Openbox or even recently started playing around with tiling desktop environments like the
I3 window manager or awesome.
I like this minimalistic, really lightning fast desktop environments.
So where do I find these system settings now?
After a little bit of searching, I found that the command is set xkb map.
This command maps your keyboard to the appropriate layout.
So my first problem is what is the name for this Swiss layout?
This could also be found in, in slash usr slash share slash x11 slash xkb slash rules.
And there you find all the layouts.
I searched for Switzerland and figured out that the correct one is CH.
Then I also needed obviously the US one, slightly easier, it's US, which will be part of
my full set xkb map command.
I also wanted that after I run this command that I could just switch very quickly between
those two keyboards.
And I finally chose one of the options that you could also see in the main pages.
The option which is by clicking both shift keys at the same time.
So the option would be GRP colon shift underscore toggle.
So the full command which I hopefully will include in the show notes is finally set xkb map
space dash option space apostrophe GRP colon shifts underscore toggle that's T O double
GLE apostrophe space apostrophe CH comma US apostrophe apostrophe.
I didn't want to really run this command every time I start the session or because it's
just too long and too difficult.
So I put it as an alias in the dot bash rc file, just called it Swiss.
So now whenever I start a computer, open a terminal, write Swiss and then I have it loaded
already and set to the proper keyboard.
So that's my solution to my problem.
This problem I had is I have this extra screen for the Raspberry Pi.
Would like to use it also as a second screen for the Chromebook.
This didn't work in the tiling desktop i3 and I just solved it with the x render command.
The full command was x render space dash dash output space HDMI 1 space dash dash auto
space dash dash right because I wanted on the right dash off space LVDS 1 basically just
write x render and you will kind of see by studying the output where the second screen
is.
Then you might have to switch from VGA to HDMI and left right and you're done.
The next issue or configuration I did on my Chromebook was to change that hostname
Krubuntu.
I wanted it to be something more personal and this was amazingly easy only needed to
edit the Krubuntu in the file hostname which is at slash ETC slash hostname.
Just change the name and that's done.
At the end of the day I don't like Unity so you can just install a whole lot of window
managers.
I installed open box, tried to install Qtile, didn't work, I told i3 and the LXT also so
on any given day I can try to play with something new and that's what I like.
This install the Terminator as a terminal emulator and I like to stay also in the terminal
for the file manager I found Ranger that I use recently as a file manager which is kind
of old school but it's just lightning fast.
Last thing I also use especially on the Raspberry Pi is for the off-site backup S3CMD.
This allows you anybody who has an Amazon account to back up to the S3 cloud of Amazon.
It was very easy to set it up and the syncing is done very nicely.
So this was basically what I found for the Raspberry Pi because it doesn't allow Dropbox
or Spyder Oak or any of those that do not have a version for ARM-based systems.
For encrypting any of this information that I put as an off-site backup I use in encrypted
file system in CFS or TrueCript of course.
This is basically my setup.
Ah one last thing just for complete nonsense and because it looks cool and it does absolutely
nothing also install C matrix just try it and run it and if you like the movie you probably
think it's cool to especially as a screensaver.
This is the end of my first podcast.
I hope you enjoyed parts of it.
I hope to learn how to do a proper own cloud installation and stop using S3 command or
Dropbox or Spyder Oak.
But I heard that the guys from Linux for the rest of us, Cody Cooper and Dortador Geek
are planning to do a podcast to teach us how to do it and I'm very much looking forward
to this and we'll implement it as soon as they do it.
Thank you very much and this was a lot of fun.
I hope to do it at some point again.
Bye bye.
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