HOWTO run Chromium OS on a Dell Mini 9 with wifi
UPDATE: I’m now running the latest build of Hexxeh’s Chrome OS named Flow – and everything just works out of the box. The release is much improved, and it’s getting very close to being the perfect day-to-day netbook OS as far as I’m concerned. Great work!
While I still really dig my Dell Mini 9, even with 2Gig of RAM it feels kinda sluggish when I have my normal 50 tabs open, and I’ve always known someone could do better (since I’m too lazy to recompile a kernel for it like I would have in the past). With all the focus on netbooks it was bound to be addressed, and while Android looks promising, it’s currently still more of a phone OS than something you’d be able to use on your netbook. I’ve run it off a USB drive on the Mini 9 just to check it out, it was cool, but again, not really usable enough for a ‘top – maybe that’s not the target. Another I want to check is Moblin, Intel’s effort using Ubuntu as a base, but I haven’t seen a Mini 9 HOWTO (maybe I’ll have to write my own…) for that. So, enter Google Chrome OS, Google’s idea of how to not only address this problem, but perhaps lay out how we will use these computers in the future. It’s always funny when I start talking about cloud and thin clients, it takes me back to dumb terminals talking to mainframes, but I digress. The point is, thanks to great posts at jasongriffey.net and Lifehacker, it’s really easy to install Google’s Chrome OS on a Dell Mini 9, the only thing I really have to add is that you have to use ChromeOS Zero from the hexxeh.net site. After all, this is an open source project, so folks are going to make changes/fix things and share with everyone. Looking at the site they had a new release, yesterday (gotta love it!) The last time I tried a build the wifi on my Mini just worked, so it looks like those problems are a thing of the past.
Four free Linux eBooks
While looking for something else, (which is mainly when I find *other* interesting things) I found an article which included links for four free Linux eBooks. This is a great resource for anyone with some Linux experience, back to others who may be looking to get started with tux, and I would have loved to have this when I started, but that was before the Internet was available to most people. So, if you’re new to Linux, or want to get started (I used Red Hat Unleashed in 1996, here it is online!), here’s some great downloads to learn from: (more…)
HOWTO: install Ruby on Rails on Debian or Ubuntu Linux easily
In the early days of this blog I used to run it on Typo, which *was* a great Ruby on Rails blogging platform (at one time). Unfortunately the project stalled (for years) and I ended up jumping ship after a few months of bugs and the ever crashing Rails server, WEBrick. Yes, if you search Netcraft you could see that was my *exposed* server at the time…not good! 
Now if you look, Typo is still kicking, and it *may* be a solid platform now, I hope it is, as I even contributed a ton of the achieved themes that live on in the ‘Theme Garden’ there. But on I moved into the world of MySQL/PHP front end sites via great apps like Drupal and Wordpress, fast forward, Ruby on Rails is a mature platform now, and I am evaluating webapps at work, so I needed to install Rails on Debian GNU/Linux (but of course these directions would work just as well in Ubuntu Linux. It’s amazing simple, I took some steps from the Ruby on Rails wiki, first install the dependencies for good measure: (more…)
HOWTO: fix fonts in Debian Lenny/Sid
UPDATE: also, before you try this, make sure you have some good fonts installed, after a fresh install of Lenny at work, I needed to run this first: apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts
After a…slight slip up, I finally had the chance to install Linux from scratch on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1500) the way I’ve always wanted it with Debian GNU/Linux – Lenny and partitioned with LVM (Linux Volume Management). After that I set out to get the desktop fonts to look as good in Debian as they did (by default) in Ubuntu. After much scouring around online I found a pretty easy tweak that got me most of the way. As root:
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
In the dialog choose these options; Autohinter, Automatic and No. Now issue this command:
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
Logout and log back into your desktop and your fonts should be *noticeably* nicer looking. Of course after that you have to drive yourself crazy tweaking the settings for autohinting and RGB lines, installing any and all ttf-* fonts apt-get sees, but hey, that’s what choice is all about!
HOWTO: automatically reconfigure Xorg in Debian
If you’re like me, you’ve messed up your xorg.conf before and wanted to start over with the default that you know dpkg-reconfigure can set it to. Because of this I’m posting here because I’ve needed it multiple times in the past and have tired of looking it up! To automatically reconfigure Xorg in Debian or Ubuntu issue the following:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
Then logout/login or restart X via contrl-alt-backspace. As one who tweaks things a bit more than he should, this has saved me a few times now. Props go to a poster on this page.
Hi, I'm fak3r and I've been online for over 15 years, blogging for 10. I work with open source software, various hardware and whatever else that I can hack on. I enjoy learning by doing, painting infrequently and listening to more music than the law allows. Feel free to follow me and comment on my thoughts and ideas; we're all in it together kid.
