Dev build crashing on google search?

If you have the voice search extension installed and enabled, right click on the microphone icon in the top right, and select disable. Seems to fix the problem.

About: Pages

For awhile now, we've known we could go to the address about:version or about:flags and get more information or different settings.

I've found theirs an in depth listing of these pages at about:about

List of About pages

• about:appcache-internals
• about:blob-internals
• about:view-http-cache
• about:credits
• about:dns
• about:flags
• about:gpu
• about:histograms
• about:memory
• about:net-internals
• about:plugins
• about:stats
• about:sync
• about:tasks
• about:tcmalloc
• about:terms
• about:version
• about:linux-proxy-config
• about:sandbox
• about:network
• about:os-credits

For Debug

The following pages are for debugging purposes only. Because they crash or hang the renderer, they're not linked directly; you can type them into the address bar if you need them.

• about:crash
• about:hang
• about:shorthang
• about:gpucrash
• about:gpuhang

Be warned however, about:sync has been crashing my browser, however it works fine on my other PC.

Ambient Light Sensor

It seems the features will never cease. The CR48's got a ambient light sensor in it as well, located just to the right of the webcam's eye.

If your display brightness isn't cranked all the way up, and you come into an area of increased light (or presumably walk outside) the display will brighten up for you.

Don't believe me? Turn the screen brightness down in a dim room, and hit the webcam with a flashlight!

Making /mnt/stateful_partition exec friendly

Finally found out how to make the /mnt/stateful_partition exec permission persistant.

open up a shell

CTRL-ALT-T

shell

sudo su

open up /sbin/chromeos_startup - i'll use nano, as I have a tutorial for installing it

nano /sbin/chromeos_startup

Now, when scrolling around in nano, the screen will not refresh properly when scrolling up/down pages, but, we can press CTRL-L to make it redraw the screen

While in nano, CTRL-C will give you you're current cursor position.

We want to edit lines 51, 58, and 67.

Remove noexec, from each of those lines

The line should then look something like .... -o nodev,nosuid .....

You can also remove the ,nosuid if you'll be wanting to install and SUID programs on the stateful partition.

Save the file by pressing CTRL-X and answering Y and pressing enter for the filename.

Reboot, and your stateful partition should be remounted with the correct options from this point forward.

Installing a VNC Viewer, part 2

Installing VNCViewer
**You need to follow the instructions in the Notes post first, to make the partitions writeable

Open up a shell on the cr-48, and

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/stateful_partition/opt (if you haven't already)
cd /mnt/stateful_partition/opt
wget http://www.calliesfarm.com/chromeos/java.tar.gz
wget http://www.calliesfarm.com/chromeos/vncviewer.tar.gz
tar -zxvf java.tar.gz
tar -zxvf vncviewer.tar.gz
rm -rf java.tar.gz vncviewer.tar.gz
ln -s /usr/bin/java jre1.6.0_23/bin/java
mv vncviewer/vncviewer /usr/bin

after it's installed, you should be able to run

vncviewer

however, since there are no close window widgets, there's two ways to disconnect.. either navigate to the vnc server icon once connected, and tell it to disconnect you. or, kill it from the terminal.

Also, in theory, you should be able to link the java plugin to the browser plugins directory, and get java working in browser, however it doesn't work for me, and I'm not sure why at the moment.

It's got shortcomings, but it's a start.

Installing Locate

Installing Locate

**You need to follow the instructions in the Notes post first, to make the partitions writeable

I'm only going to give you the simple method for this one, as it has many files that need to be put in different directories

Open up a shell on the cr-48, and

sudo su

wget http://www.calliesfarm.com/chromeos/locate.tar.gz

mv locate.tar.gz /

cd /

tar -zxvf locate.tar.gz

rm -rf locate.tar.gz

after it's installed, you should be able to run

updatedb

to populate the database, and it should add a cron job to auto update the db daily

Installing the Nano text editor

I've discovered that the stock cr-48 setup can use binary packages from Arch Linux.

This is how to install the Nano editor from arch. I'll provide two different methods, depending on if you want to pull the package from the repository yourself, or use my repackaged binary.

**You need to follow the instructions in the Notes post first, to make the partitions writeable

* Installing from an Arch repo.

You'll need to download the package to a linux machine of your choosing. You can find the package at: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/nano/

The package is compressed as a .tar.xz, which eluded me for the longest time.

To extract the package use XZ Utils on Linux

The syntax is: xz -d filename

Once you have decompressed the file from it's .xz container, you will be left with a .tar file, which the cr-48 has tools to open.

Now we need to get the file to the CR-48.

If you have a ssh server on your linux box, we can use sftp to retrieve the file

sftp user@host If you don't have an ssh server, you can upload the file to some public webspace, and wget the file from the cr-48

Once the file is on your cr-48, you can tar -xvf it, and copy the nano exec from the bin directory into /usr/bin (which is in the path) and nano should run flawlessly.

** If you don't want to go through all that work, open up a shell on the cr-48, and wget http://www.calliesfarm.com/chromeos/nano.tar.gz then, tar -zxvf nano.tar.gz and move the nano exec to /usr/bin

Notes

**You need to be somewhat versed in Linux for any of these mods.

**You need to have full shell access to use any of my tidbits here, whether this is by developer mode (which is what I did), or some other method you come up with.

While I could go and dual-boot the cr-48 into Ubuntu, I picked to leave the Chrome OS, and modify it to make it more shell friendly.

**You also need to make the root partition writable, and turn off boot verification.

sudo /usr/share/vboot/bin/make_dev_ssd --remove_rootfs_verification
sudo reboot

Then:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /
sudo mount -o remount,exec /mnt/stateful_partition

You will also need to re-run these commands after every reboot, so you may want to stick them in a shell script.

I'd like to get a full build system on it, but I'm not sure if that's possible yet.

I'm also working on getting java and acrobat support into the browser.