Episode: 3377
Title: HPR3377: Chromebook support and more
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3377/hpr3377.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:21:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3377 Fortuzzi, the 13th of July 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Chromebook Support and More.
It is hosted by ZenFloater2 and is about 17 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is I run into disaster using my Chromebook.
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All right boys and girls, time for another episode of ZenFloater,
a former human being converted into squirrel in the 1960s by aliens, audio, podcast or whatever.
I decided to do another one on the Chromebook here.
I'm using the Google Chromebook Go, the big one with the i7 and 16 gigabytes of RAM and I don't know
what is it, half a terabyte SSD or whatever it's got in there.
Anyway, it's a monster and I've been using it for a while.
And I decided I would do a hacker public radio first.
We're going to record a podcast while I take a bath in the bathtub.
So let's get the water going here.
And hopefully you can hear the water going close the drain there.
And we're letting the water fill the bathtub.
Now I've enjoyed using these Chromebooks but I just wanted to comment on all Chromebooks
like you know, I've got two of them.
I've got an Acer.
It's like a year and a half older than this one.
And already the Acer Chromebook that has the M3700 processor, I believe it is,
Fortcore processor and four gigabytes of RAM and a really small,
I don't know, I don't want to call it SSD.
It's just like a USB flash drive if some kind of put it in there.
That thing already can't install three
applications from the Android Google Play Store.
They're already dropping support from the Android side for that Chromebook.
So I'm probably starting to look at converting that to get a Chromebook into a Linux
laptop of some kind in the near future because I believe they already have worked out a conversion
for that particular model to get it away from Chrome OS.
So I did not get a full four years where the use out of that Acer before they decided it.
But it's a part of it.
And peace is anyway.
I mean, by and large, I can still get Chrome OS updates and everything else works.
It's just at the Android Play Store, it's failing.
So I'm figuring this Google Chromebook Progo, what have you called?
The big one that I bought here, the expensive one.
Well, probably go the full four years or five years.
However many years I've got a support before.
The PlayStation Play Store starts dropping support for a whole four.
And when they do, hopefully they'll figure out how to do a conversion to this.
It'd be great if I could run both of them in Figuita, which I'm going to be looking into
in the next month or two of Booty Figuita on the Acer anyway and see if I can run Figuita in it.
And I just use it sort of as a dumb terminal.
What should be good for me?
I've also wanted to make note that Ubuntu 6.9 did release on May 1st or thereabouts.
And so we've been using it now for a little over a month.
It's a decent release. There's been a lot of improvements to it.
And I've been using the new Figuita 6.9, which
Kawamoto has been keeping patched. We're up to patch 8 now in the OpenVSD security architecture
for AMD, I-36 and ARM. And I like that.
And I decided I would experiment with a couple of other USB live some drive operating systems
that just recently came out that caught my attention.
And one of which is known as anti-X. And I think it's 19.0 something or another.
Was it 19.2 or 19.3? I can't remember. Just came out and I downloaded that the 64-bit version.
They also have a 32-bit version. And that is a really nice desktop with three separate
window managers you've been choosing from, I believe. It's based on that Debian investor.
They do not use system B. They're using, I think it's, I'm not sure what in it they're using.
I thought it was system B in it, but maybe I'm wrong on that. It could be open RC.
But they're not using system B. And they did a really nice job of it. When you add programs,
they show up on the menus. They wrote a script to make sure that they show up on the menus.
And it's really quite nice what they've done with it. I approve of it.
I like to run dillow occasionally and I was surprised to notice, well not really surprised,
but anyway, just wanted to make note that if you run dillow, you'll find that they put a bunch of
bookmarks in there for various communist sites, which, you know, and end up the sites, which are
kind of unusual for someone like me being from Oklahoma to watch. But anyway, it provided some
color to it and let you know who is developing it. And I think they really did a great job and
big pat in the back to them. And I'd recommend anybody that likes a Linux USB distribution,
you know, a live USB distribution. It worked out well and I've even installed to the hard drive
in one of my other laptops and they used it for a week and it worked pretty good. The next live USB
distro that I tried was Nomad BSD. And Nomad BSD just made a release of their 130 version,
which is a actually based on free BSD 13.0, their 130 release. And that gives you the new ZFS
file system. The one that they're they're going to standardize on that is the same one that's
found in Linux now since they're developing ZFS outside of free BSD and supporting it to
other operating systems from there. And so you get the use of that, you can, when you boot that
USB, it asks you to create a live storage area in your USB stick and it uses whatever space
that's left available in creates an encrypted storage area for your home directory, which I thought
was also very nice in the menu. They also offer a live installation in the hard drive, which you
can install either UFS, the old file system or ZFS using the new standardize ZFS, the new open
architecture supported ZFS. And I installed that to a laptop and rather locked it and it had a
lot of support for commercial drivers too on the market that you couldn't get with
Panthex X because unfortunately a lot of the commercial manufacturers for communication drivers
and things like that, they're now requiring you to to have an operating system that has system D.
So they're not going to be supporting DEB1 or void Linux or Gen2 or anything like that that
doesn't use system D, any operating system that doesn't use system D, which I thought was
pretty big issue of a lot of these companies, but they're literally standardizing, you know,
they're literally mandating that you're going to have system D. But FreeBSD does have a driver support
for a cornered portion of commercial support. By the way, void Linux has a little bit too.
You know, there's a little bit of support for void Linux under run it, which may translate over
into run it on DEB1, I'm not sure, I haven't tried it on some of these drivers. But at any
rate, the other thing that was great about Nomad BST was they have the ability for you to set up
Google Chrome on there and how they do it is they install a copy of, I believe it's you
do 1804 in a jail for you with a click of a button and then download Chrome and set it up and it
works. And you get access to you do. So not only do you get package install access to a wide range
of software, which is frankly their catalog is about as big as DEB1's. You can also download
anything that will run on Ubuntu 1804 and run it inside Nomad BST, which is pretty cool.
So you get the best of both worlds, frankly. Well, here recently, I've decided on
one of my laptops that I'm going to start running Tristol 9 again, doing an evaluation of a
free software I recently tried to run Geeks version 1.3. They have a new version out or have
had a new version out for a while. And I was pretty impressed with that. It will allow you to build
a desktop and cryptic install. Download everything from the network and set it up for you.
Did a great job except I'm not too sure about
I had a little trouble with a couple of the packages that I tried to install and I could have
gotten around that but decided that for the commercial support into it, maybe the best thing
for me to do would be to go back to a system D type operating system and run Tristol and a lot
of you're asking why would I be wanting to use plus or proprietary drivers or something like Tristol.
Well, I like Tristol because it's a very stable, well-vetted, well-debugged operating system,
just like I like Dev1. Dev1 is essentially recycled devian where they've had one more look at
every package and got another chance to iron out all the bugs. So really Tristol 9 is like a super
Ubuntu 1804. It is. It's a super Ubuntu 1804 without any of the proprietary drivers.
So anything that ends up being proprietary would be something that you add on there.
And I found that a lot of Tristol's software of course from 1804 error is pretty agent.
So I decided to then take Geeks and install it on Tristol which you can do from the Geeks website.
There's like four commands you may issue to get the Geeks daemon set up and populated.
And then go into your user account and do a Geeks dash pull to have it compile. I like to have
all my software compile to fit Tristol. So during the install I refused to accept dating binaries
and the signature keys for them that's indicating the system that I wanted to compile everything
that installed. Geeks packs just like package source that you would use with NetBSD.
And it's really, in my opinion, the Arch Linux package source, that's what Geeks is.
It's the Arch Linux free software package source. The architecture is fantastic.
They allow you to install multiple versions over time of various software like you can have
two or three versions of EMAX if you decided you needed that. I decided that the flat pack
version on Tristol was too old, even the one that was available through Pretonia. Backparts is too
old. So I am installing flat pack via Geeks which is going to be the latest version of flat pack.
And that way I can then want some flat packs because Tristol 9 unlike Tristol 8 does support
flat packs now so you can use that. So anyway, I hope you can hear the water running and everything.
I'm not going to edit or smooth up this audio too much. As I say, it's been recorded in the Linux
volume of the Google Chromebook Go using the Google Chromebook Go's natural microphone.
It's not a special microphone. I find the audio and video of the Chromebook Go to be
superior to anything else I own. He just is. The next best video and audio that I have is on a
cheap $183 Dell I bought two, three years ago. It's like a college student entry level type notebook
with CD-ROM DVD burner built in. Dell has four gigs of RAM and that's what I've installed
Tristol 1 and I'm using a plug-in USB doggle to get access to the OpenBSD Wi-Fi router that are
running this house and I'm currently installing gig to that. It's an N37 and a processor with 1.6
gigahertz of speed so it's rather slow but it gets the job done. You can always have 500 gigabyte
hard drive. I don't need much because I find even on the Chromebook if I need extra file space
storage I'll just use the fuse file system and the fuse SSH file system to create a share
to the one of the eight terabyte drives that I have on the OpenBSD server and I'll create a
large enough volume for me to play and if I need extra space to do something on my Google
Chromebook or my Tristol install on that particular Dell in 3,700 equipped laptop.
And that works well around the house. It's not too great on the road of courses you know because
Ben with is going to be an issue so there you have it and I don't really have anything else to
report of and we just got the news today that Netanyahu is out he's finished as the Prime Minister
of Israel that happened today. It is the 14th I believe Monday isn't it? Yeah Monday the 14th it's
about 740 pm here in the state of Oklahoma and oh they also had some news about Biden getting lost
at the D7 summit and wandering around like he didn't know where he was at. I really don't know
that we're going to have President Biden much longer. I'll be surprised if he lasts to Christmas
before they go ahead and put Kamala Harris in there I really would because I think he's he's
heading for the nursing home folks. So anyway, squirrels have to take bath. I hope you've enjoyed
this bath time podcast and I'll be publishing it to hacker public radio as another first for
hacker public radio first squirrel to do a podcast on hacker public radio from a bathtub with
water in it using a Google Chromebook Go. Now that's got to be a first. No one else has ever tried that.
Bye bye for now humans.
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