Ubuntu Linux on Chromebook: Crouton vs ChrUbuntu, or installing over Chrome OS or dual booting.

For the end of the term at the University, I've decided to bring with me my Chromebook (Samsung Series 5). I am on a computer science degree, so I must sometimes act like I am a power user or at least, have access to ssh, plus a X client. Therefore, it seemed obvious that I sometimes needed to have a desktop environment able to run native applications (e.g java), plus the X thing via ssh. Okay, Chrome OS is somehow able to do ssh and some sort of X server-client thing, because it's still a Linux operating system underneath, but it's not brilliant at that. 

Before starting anything, I need to say that I am not responsible for anything that happens to your computer by following what I will say. You are doing everything on your own responsibility. Everything is specifically designed for Samsung Chromebook Series 5. It might apply to other machines, or it might not. Please check the sources carefully before doing anything.

One vs. another.

Just to make everything clear: 

• ChrUbuntu is installed on a removable storage, so it doesn't touch the internal storage or alter it.
• crouton is installed on the internal storage, so it *might* touch the internal storage.

My recommendation is crouton, for a number of reasons I will enumerate in the section designed to it. ChrUbuntu is probably easier to install, and easier to use, but it has some fundamental drawbacks which make it a bit annoying. For crouton, you'll probably need to use the terminal a little bit, but it's really not that much to be afraid of.

However, because ChrUbuntu is installed on a removable storage, all you have to do in order to get rid of it is to format that storage. This is rather easy, and won't affect the existing Chrome OS installation from the internal storage at all. For crouton, there are some commands to run in Chrome OS in order to remove it, because it installed on the internal storage of the Chromebook. This can get risky sometimes, and if something goes wrong, the only way to recover is to get back to the original state of the storage, and that is to wipe everything and set-up as a new Chromebook.

Fortunately, on Samsung Series 5, there is a hardware switch which just turns off developer mode, and so it wipes the internal storage completely. It might be this easy on other Chromebooks also, but I am not sure about this matter. I advise you to search a little more on recovery for your Chromebook before doing anything.

ChrUbuntu.

First off, I tried to install ChrUbuntu. ChrUbuntu is a quite nice thing, it runs, as I have already told, on a USB flash drive or on a SD card, and you basically dual-boot in order to be able to get into Ubuntu. Yes, you need to reboot for that, so you don't have both running on the same time. 

Installation. 

Technically, to get anything working you need to follow everything from (this is the official ChrUbuntu website) (here), except that at point number 4, you MUST replace the command with the one you get from (here), according to your device and according to where you are installing it (USB flash or SD card). That is all.

Note: turning on developer mode will remove everything from the internal storage!

Luckily, it's not a very hard process (even though at first sight is seems so), and it should be easily reversible in most cases. Unfortunately, after a month, my USB drive stopped working (applications were reporting I/O errors when it happened), and after a reboot it failed to boot anymore in ChrUbuntu. I've seen some other people complaining about this, I don't know if it's only the flash drive which has been broken, if it's related to ChrUbuntu, or if something from the operating system got broken. Anyway, Chrome OS was just fine. 

Booting it up.

What I should mention here is how ChrUbuntu is supposed to start. When you first start the Chromebook, you'll get a warning screen with a "scary" face. At this point, you have three options:

• Wait for about 30 seconds and it will beep two times, and boot Chrome OS.
• Hit Ctrl + D -> instantly boot Chrome OS.
• Hit Ctrl + U -> boot Ubuntu.

Nothing that complicated at all. If you hit Ctrl + U and the installation of Ubuntu is not present, than it will beep so that you know that it can't boot.

Good and bad points.

+ Ubuntu runs exactly like on a regular computer.

+ so you can do (almost, look below) anything you would do on any other machine running Ubuntu.

+ the guy who created ChrUbuntu took care of the drivers, everything is working fine (on my machine at least).

+ little or no maintenance to involved, so might be suitable for people not willing to touch the terminal at all.

+ nothing really altered on the internal storage (except when you first turn on developer mode).

- it's only Ubuntu 12.04, not one of the latest versions.

- because it's installed on a USB drive (2.0 is supported only), or on a SD card, it's deadly slow.

- limited to the maximum speed of the medium it's installed on.

- requires a medium of at least 8 GB, about 2 GB will be free after installation.

- has no swap partition, so when you get out RAM...well, Chrome and other applications will eventually crash, or lag being very bad.

Crouton.  

It's a bit more complicated, but the huge advantage is that it runs on top of Chrome OS, and in the same time with Chrome OS. Therefore, it uses the kernel provided by Chrome OS, all the drivers from Chrome OS, and everything else that is provided by Chrome OS, and so everything should be working just fine and it's extremely fast. When I say extremely fast, I mean that it's one of the fastest experiences I've seen to date on a computer running Ubuntu (this is on just 2 GB of RAM and a dual-core Intel Atom processor running at just 1.6GHz!). 

Important here: just don't do the silly thing of installing Xfce instead of Unity. Xfce is just awful. It has the worst interface I've seen, it's not attractive at all, half of the icons are broken etc etc etc. Go for Unity from the beginning. I did the silly thing, and it seems that there are some "traces" from Xfce on my installation of Unity, and it's sometimes annoying, but I can still do whatever I want because I have the terminal available. 

Actually, forget what I said above. Xfce works actually quite well, and it is worth to give it a try. It will be significantly faster than with Unity, but I still think that Unity will give higher productivity. It's really up to you. Please note that you must use "xfce" wherever you see "unity" in this guide, and start it using "sudo startxfce4" after installation.

Installation.

For the installation, follow the first point from ChrUbuntu for your own Chromebook, that is, just to turn on developer mode. I repeat, from (here), follow just the first point!

Then, from (here), download the package provided. 

Afterwards, follow the guide from (here, same as before but at another heading), but for the point 2, type "unity" instead of "xfce". This will install Unity. For point 4), type "sudo startunity", and Unity will start. Everything else is the same.

Note: logging off does not work for me, for some reason. If this is the case for you, to close Unity, just hit Ctrl + Alt + Back to get back to Chrome OS, and then, in the crosh window in which Unity is running, hit Ctrl + C. This is not a very elegant way of closing it, but it should kill it pretty okay.

Starting it up.

Just as with ChrUbuntu, when you power up your Chromebook, you will get the "scary" face warning. But now, you can wait for 30 seconds and Chrome OS will boot automatically, or you can hit Ctrl + D and it will boot Chrome OS at that moment.

When you want to start unity from now on, hit Ctrl + Alt + T. This will open a crosh window on Chrome OS. There, type "shell". Afterwards, type "sudo startunity", just as before, and it should start.

To close it, try to click logoff. If it doesn't work, then go to Chrome OS, and in the crosh window, hit Ctrl + C.

Good points and bad points of this method.

+ it runs on top of Chrome OS, in the same time with it.

+ easily switch between them.

+ everything is guaranteed to work.

+ performance is absolutely astonishing, as everything is optimized for Chrome OS.

+ Unity + my apps apps add up to about 2 GB, leaving around 8 GB of free storage.

+ unified storage, so each OS can easily manage the files.

- it's only Ubuntu 12.04.

- can be a bit too technical for some users.

- in my experience, I had to use the terminal quite a little bit.

- uses internal storage (not excessively much).

- resources are shared, but I could not notice any difference.

Conclusion.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about the Chrome OS not being a complete operating system, about not knowing to do that and that, about being too minimalist and so on. With the possibility of having Linux working on a Chromebook, this completely vanishes. It's definitely not a solution which satisfies anyone, at least not on my machine. I am expecting it to work much better on the Series 5 550, the newer generation of Chromebooks that has the Celeron processor and double the amount of RAM.

However, it transforms the Chromebook into a computer that is capable of handling almost all the tasks a home or a power user would need to perform.


If you have any kind of questions, I will answer them here. I will try to look regularly for this on this particular post. I think that almost anything you would need can be found just by searching on Google, but if you still need help, I am here and I will try to provide it. 

Review of "VirtualBox 3.1 - Beginner's Guide" book.

“VirtualBox 3.1 - Beginner’s Guide -- is a book released by Packt, a publishing company which produces books and eBooks for administrators, developers, but also for newbies. This book is organized in 8 chapters, each chapters being organized in more parts, making it easier to learn and understand what the book contains. A free chapter (like a demo for you) is available for download here.”




This is a book designed for the beginners, as the title say, but I would definitely recommend it to anybody (even to the experts) who would like to use the virtualization. It starts by telling you the minimum resources your computer should be having. Whether your on Windows on Linux, you don’t have to worry, because the whole process, from starting the download to finishing the installation is explained clearly in words, and with the help of images at every step. Whether you had never “touched” VirtualBox ever before or not, it is practically no way to get stuck.

I have to tell you that the Guide is designed for VirtualBox 3.1, the newest version of VirtualBox being 3.2.6 now. However, 99% of what is presented in this book is still correct. VirtualBox has been created by Sun, which has been recently bought by Oracle, who, of course, got everything Sun had (including VirtualBox), in their “property”. Even if after that significant improvements were done to the VirtualBox ( guest operating systems run mainly better now), many people say that Oracle killed the VirtualBox, because there are currently several problems present. However, as I’ve already told, 99% of what is in this book is still applicable, because, theoretically, everything remained the same.

I told that I recommend this book even to the experts, because, even if it explains things like configuring (in a basical way) VirtualBox and downloading an image of an operating system, installing it and running that OS, the author also explains things that I couldn’t pass using my own knowledge. It explains anything, from 3D hardware acceleration for the guest OS, to the best configuration of the HDD, and from the optimal network configuration, to the remote control of the operating system (these are advanced things). Of course that it also explains you what you can do with a virtual operating system (this is useful if you come from Windows for example, and you have never used Linux before).

The reason for which the author chose VirtualBox is simple in my opinion. It offers anything a newbie or an expert would wish to do via virtualization, and more than this, it is free. If you are a beginner in virtualization and you buy this book, I recommend you reading it all (there is a common English used, so even if you’re not a native English speaker, like me, you’ll surely understand anything), or, even if you know how to use VirtualBox, there is a possibility to get stuck somewhere, so having this book on your desktop would be a real help in this situation.

At the start of each chapter, there are some lines which tell you exactly what you’re going to learn. After you finish each chapter, it will give you advice on what to do (eg: to continue practising what you’ve learned), and it will also summarize all that the chapter has covered. At the end of the book, there are more quizzes which will help you to verify the knowledge you accumulated. This is something that I like and I think that they are really useful for everybody.

To conclude, I think that “VirtualBox 3.1 - Beginner’s Guide” is a book that is worth buying, because it addresses to absolutely anybody who uses or intends to use the virualization on his/her computer.

Installing Ubuntu on MacBook (via VirtualBox).

Today I have installed Ubuntu (under VirtualBox) on my 13,3" MacBook White. Ahead, I'm going to describe everything you should know, in order to get Ubuntu and Mac OS X on the same MacBook. I want you to know clearly. Ubuntu will run inside Mac OS X, it won't be installed separately. In order to boot Ubuntu, Mac OS X needs to be already booted. They're going to run at the same time.

So, let's get started. First, you need to get VirtualBox from here, and a image of Ubuntu from here (please choose your country). Install VirtualBox like any other application for Mac OS X, and start it. Let the image of Ubuntu like it is.

Now, on VirtualBox, do the following:

• click "New"
• click "Next"
• give it a name and at operating system select "Linux", and at version select "Ubuntu"
• select an amount of memory to allocate to Ubuntu (do not give it more than your current free RAM memory; 512 MB are really enough if you don't have more) and click "Next"
• be sure that "Create new hard disk" is selected, and click "Next"
• click "Next"
• check "Dynamically expended storage" and click "Next"
• here just select the size for Ubuntu, and click "Next"
• now click "Finish"

As you can see, on the left column of VirtualBox, your new Ubuntu appeared. Now do these:

• click "Start"
• select "OK"
• when the window appears, click "Next"
• now, at the Media Type select "CD/DVD-ROM Device", and at Media Source click on the folder from the right, click "Add", and select the recently downloaded image of Ubuntu. Select it and click "Select"
• click "Next"
• click "Finish"

Now the image of Ubuntu is going to be booted automatically. Install it like usually. Don't worry about the partitions, let it install itself on the entire hard drive, because it's a virtual one, made by VirtualBox. None of you data will be affected.

After the installation of Ubuntu is completed, give it the requested reboot. Don't worry if Ubuntu moves hard, it is normal at this moment. Now, on the window of Ubuntu, click on "Devices" (the button is up, on the silver bar), and select "Install Guest Additions". On the window that appeared, select just to open the folder. Now, drag the file named "VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run" on the desktop of Ubuntu. Continue by doing the following:

• on Ubuntu, go to "Applications" --> "Accessories" --> "Terminal"
• here, on Terminal type: "cd Desktop" (without quotes)
• type in Terminal: "sudo sh VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run"
• now you have to enter your password (that one you have entered when you installed Ubuntu; type it, and even you don't see anything, it is there; tap enter when done, or if you haven't entered a password, just tap enter)
• wait for a few minutes
• when installation is completed (last line is like the line you saw at the start), close the Terminal

If any reboot is requested, accept it. When you are ready, open the Terminal again and:

• type "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf"
• enter again the password you have entered during installation, and tap enter
• on the window that has appeared, modify where it says "Modes" with the resolution of your monitor (on my MacBook White 13,3" it is 1280x800)
• save that file and close it
• restart the operating system

After restart, Ubuntu should already be running on the selected resolution, on full screen.

Now you can change many settings in VirtualBox (while Ubuntu is shut down), as the video memory allocated to Ubuntu. Be sure not to give it too much, as the operating systems are sharing their resources. For Desktop Effects, 3D acceleration should be enabled, but on my Ubuntu (10.04 Alpha 3), the mouse disappears when the 3D acceleration is on.

So, that's all. Congratulations if you succeed. Your new Ubuntu installation is completed. Enjoy!

P.S: This works also for the installation of Ubuntu under Windows, because all you need to to is 100% the same.

Setting up WDS (wireless distribution system) between Asus routers.

Asus made a great job with their routers, being a popular company in this domain. Their routers assure a pretty good range of signal, excellent speed, and high stability for network connections. But in a large building a normal router from Asus won't be enough. It won't be able deliver signal and will loose speed if thick walls and other wireless/bluetooth/infrared devices are between. Here comes the WDS, or Wireless Distribution System.

This system consists of two routers of the same type or not (at least both from Asus), which will be connected together resulting a larger area of signal, and higher speeds on devices which had lower signals on a single router.

You need one of the routers to be connected to the internet via a ethernet cable, and the other will communicate (together with his clients) through the first one. Please be sure which one is connected "outside" on the internet (the main router, we'll name it "first router"), and the other one, which will communicate through the "first router" (this is going to be named the "second router")

Here is a guide that will let you know everything that you need to do (with pictures): http://www.4shared.com/file/229730229/3f658e18/ASUS_Wireless_Router_WDS_Confi.html

The main things are:

• both routers must be set to operate into "Hybrid" mode
• both routers must operate on the same Channel
• both routers must have the same security method and the same password
• their LAN ip's must NOT be the same!
• first router must have DHCP server enabled, while the other (second one) doesn't
• first router must have normal internet settings (depending on how you connect to the internet), while the other must have "automated IP" settings.
• after you are sure that you know their LAN ip addresses, give them the same SSID (name)

By doing the last point, any wireless device will allow you to connect to the router corresponding to that name. But, in fact, there are two routers working together under the same name.

Now you should be able to get on the internet on wireless or via any LAN port from both routers.

Method implemented for Asus WL-520GC <--> Asus WL-520GU by me and works perfectly. Good luck!