Chromebook development machine, 1 month in

I’ve been using a Chromebook lately as my primary machine. In my first post I’ve explained the basic setup and issues I was having. Having used my Chromebook for a while now I think I have (even) more sensible things to say.

VPS

I think I have finally settled on a VPS. My ansible configs have come a long way. With regard to RAM: 2GB is enough, 1 GB is not, it’s that simple. It also matters which virtualization you use. I’ve started out with OpenVZ, this is what all the cheap VPS’s are using. The major downside it that you are unable to run kernel modules with it.

FUSE

And I wanted to use a kernel module, FUSE. This is used to mount external filesystems. I wanted a ‘drive’ back by one of the big storage providers. This drive I could take with me as a moved from VPS to VPS. After much deliberation I settled with S3QL. This requires FUSE (as they all do). This meant choosing any other virtualization over OpenVZ. Currently I’m running a KVM VPS at FileMedia after trying the 1GB offering at DigitalOcean.

Not settled yet

S3QL is nice, it encrypts my stuff on the backend but that means I can only access it via S3QL. Bittorrent just released their Sync offering and I tried it out using my RaspberryPi as a store, this seems to work well and I plan to start using it.

Music

This is still hard. I’ve sort of settled on Grooveshark and, surprisingly enough, my phone which I use anyway daily for tunes.

Overall

I like my Chromebook, however it has some distinct disadvantages. For one it is slow. It’s not that I have to wait a lot but it is just not as snappy as my old Macbook (not that I expected it to be so). I would love for it to be just a tad more powerful. The other downside is external screens; while they nearly always work, disconnecting always leads to a frozen Chromebook. I now just power off the device, booting is quick enough. Seems that after 20 years external monitors are still hard. Then there is printing and scanning. I still have some hope for printing but scanning seems just not possible. My Canon LiDE 110, a devise I absolutely adore, will sit idle. My aging Lexmark E120n network printer will also gather dust.

To end on a happier note; battery life is just great. It is also perfectly predictable, all the compiling I used to do now happens on my VPS!