This is a recycled post from my tumblr weblog

Ha ha ha just lying the real title should be

Turning a Piece of Shit Chromebook into a Good Enough Development Machine Because You’re Unemployed and Feel Like An Ass Trying to Justify Spending $2000 on a God Damned Macbook so You Wound Up Buying a Chromebook Instead

Anyway, I’m unemployed because of reasons and figured there were better things to do with the credit limit on my credit card than spend $2000 on a Macbook, so I bought one of the highest rated Chromebooks at my “willing to pay this much” price point: the Chromebook C100P. The stats are as follows:

• Processor: Piece of shit system-on-chip ARM thing
• RAM: Yes
• Screen: Acceptable but you can see the pixels
• Keyboard: Ugh

Considering it’s still an order of magnitude better than the first good laptop I owned, it’s a pretty good buy at $200 and some change.

So Chrome OS is nice but I want to introduce security holes to the device, so LET’S INSTALL PLAIN OLD LINUX.

The first thing to do is follow the instructions to install crouton via the instructions. You get the option of what flavor of Linux to install, after 8 hours of experimenting with Debians and Ubuntus I found the one with the best support is Trusty. So do this after downloading crouton in Developer Mode:

sudo sh crouton -r trusty -t xfce,touch,xiwi

“But I like Unity,” you say. I respond with “NO YOU DON’T IMAGINARY IDIOT NO YOU DON’T NOBODY LIKES UNITY UNLESS THEY WORK FOR CANONICAL.”

“But that is a very old Ubuntu,” you say. Welp, the only big thing that will really matter is you’ll have to load up an older .tmux.conf with the older mouse mode switches because that’s all I found was missing. Everything else we will download from third parties.

Also follow the directions to install the Chrome extension in the host ChromeOS browser, it’s helpful.

Golang

Luckily the dudes at the Go project are charitable and offer an ARM version of the Golang toolchain. Go get a -armv6l version of Go from the downloads page and decompress it in your home dir. If you use ~/workspace as your Go home like I do, add this junk to your .bashrc:

export GOROOT=~/go
export GOPATH=~/workspace

Okay cool Go is ready to go. That last sentence’s wording was not intentional nor was it a joke, get over yourself.

Python

Trusty uses an older version of Python. Continuum’s got it. Get an armv6l installer of Miniconda and install it in your home dir. It’ll even add itself to your $PATH. Python’s covered.

VS Code, the unlikeliest IDE

For some inexplicable reason Visual Studio Code is the best IDE for writing Go. It’s an indisputable fact and goes to further prove that we live in a cruel, arbitrary universe that often makes no sense. This headmelted dude has you covered for builds of VS Code for piece of shit ARM processors. Ignore his instructions, open a terminal in your xfce session and do this:

wget https://code.headmelted.com/installers/apt.sh
sudo sh ./apt.sh

now VS Code is installed. You can code in these two arbitrary languages I have chosen as my favorites on this awful hardware, and to be honest it’s minimally painful (minus building huge Golang projects).