Fixing life, One day at a time...

Removing Chrome OS

https://mrchromebox.tech/#fwscriptUsed the Full ROM Firmware to remove the Google crap out of the machine. GalliumOS vs XUBUNTU Gallium OS 2 is not supported properly with the Full ROM, so i had to get the nightly build with 3.1 alpha build. It worked perfectly fine, but there is nothing happening in Gallium for a while - I am not sure if the OS is still being maintained or not. I do understand that the OS is being built by devs during spare time and there is no team who is fully dedicated to get the releases out. This delay combined with all the machines at home running xubuntu, I decided to install xubuntu on the chromebook and try to fix the issues along the way. 

Issue List Track pad not workingNo SoundSlowness (Compared to Gallium)No shortcut keys working - the chromebook keyboard ones. 

Trackpad fix Ran the below command to get the trackpad working.  xinput set-prop "Elan Touchpad" "Synaptics Finger" 5 10 50
Problem is it keeps getting reset ev…

Now that I was closing accounts which I was trying to find paid alternatives for - I realized something very interesting. Most providers just agree to disable the account, but do not agree to delete your data. Its making me more focused to get away from these "free" service providers.

My new goal is to get away from all free services by Jan 31st 2019.

After the new facebook data sharing crap, I believe its high time we stop giving data to these companies who make money selling your information. When you realize that nothing in life comes for free, you start to realize how bad things are. We often worry that the government is tracking you, but it feels that it's not the government we need to worry about; its these companies.

I started with facebook for now - I downloaded all my data and started the delete process. It will be a slow process until i find paid alternatives for everything I need to live in this connected life.

Lets see where I land and what I end up paying for.

If you have read my last OS, I do have Gallium running on my Chromebook.

I bought Chrome OS thinking it will just be a machine to check email when I am on-the-go and it worked fine for a while until I just got annoyed how little I could do with it.

Thanks to crouton, I was able to run xfce on the box for a while which removed some of the pain - but there was still something lingering in the back of my head. What about running linux on it full time.

Replaced with various distros and had a lot of problems - some had no sound, some had keyboard problems and some trackpad problems.

Finally found Gallium and it worked perfectly. Have been using it for the last 2 months and have had no issues at all.

Think I am finally happy with my chromebook.

Having been working on Linux for such a long time, I seem to be coming back to xfce (thru xubuntu) every single time i switch to a different distro.

I really had high expectations on most of the ubuntu distros, but all seem to be failing in one form or another.

Ubuntu - Hate the Gnome 3.x interface mixed with the canonical's work on it. Not sure why, but it just did not work for me.

Lubuntu - I liked Lubuntu, as it was pretty close to xubuntu; but the interface felt too dated for me. I will definitely use it in the future if i have a machine old enough to need this. I don't really have any complaints on this one. I do understand that it does serve its purpose of being the light weight OS for old machines - which makes it perfect for what its meant to do.

Elementary - The interface was awesome, but it was bad when i had to install anything which does not go well with that interface. I use eclipse for 50% of my work and it was horrible on elementary. I had to ditch it.

Mint - I …

Commands

sudo usermod -a -G vboxsf <user_id>
sudo chown -R <user_id>:users /media/sf_<folder_name>/

Run on Terminal:

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -

echo 'deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

If you see the below error when you try to run postman, don't worry... Just run the apt-get and you should be all good

Postman Error
./Postman: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

command to fix the issue
sudo apt-get install libgconf2-4

Recently i have been having issues while writing code on my chromebook, wherein eclipse would randomly crash.

In order to debug that, i installed htop. My assumption was that eclipse was running out of memory considering i am running it on a 4GB chromebook running xfce.

There are a lot of plugins on Eclipse which run, which i guess were causing it and i did not have the patience to go thru all of them and remove the ones i did not need. I am sure it was you spell check!! I am sure...

I basically increased the xmx setting in the eclipse.ini file to 1280m and i haven't had any crashes after that. Guessing will go higher if it crashes.


p.s. I am looking to buy a desktop to offload some of the work as i am not sure how sustainable this is.

Here are the steps i used to setup mysql on xfce (chromebook)


open terminalrun sudo apt-get install mysql-serverduring the installation, you will be asked to enter the root password for the mysql instance - this is not the password for the root user for linux.restart the server to get it running using sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restartyou may get some warning - you can ignore thatfor security setup, run mysql_secure_installation. you can set the password rules, connection rules etc. hererestart again using step 3check status using sudo /etc/init.d/mysql status and you should get the below response (or something similar to that)

 * /usr/bin/mysqladmin  Ver 8.42 Distrib 5.7.22, for Linux on x86_64 Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Server version5.7.22-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 Protocol version10 ConnectionLocalhost via UNIX…

Basically the track pad on my Acer Chromebook 14 was a mess as the palm detection was turned off by default when you install xfce using crouton.

here is how you turn it on

To check what is the current settings:
synclient | grep "Palm"

you will get the below response
    PalmDetect              = 0
    PalmMinWidth            = 10
    PalmMinZ                = 200


you basically need to set the PalmDetect to 1 and PalmMinWidth to about 3. That did the trick for me. Below are the commands to use

synclient PalmDetect=1
synclient PalmMinWidth=3

Another pain point is that everytime you logout, the settings get reset back to 0 and 10. So i basically set this up as a startup command. Make sure you add 2 seperate commands, else they do not seem to work.


go to "session and startup"go to "Application Autostart" tabclick on "Add"give some name and description and add the command. next time you log back in, the commands will be run automatically and palm dete…

Because I usually connect my chromebook to a monitor, i hate to keep opening the chromebook to click on the 3 key combination to move between xfce and chrome OS.

Here is what i did to run xfce in a tab. I just set the chrome tab to full screen to make it look nice.

in the chrome os shell, type in the below command
sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -t xiwi -u

you will need the crouton integration app on chrome for this to work, else you will get a unable to connect to extension message.

run the below command once you install the app
sudo startxfce4 -X xiwi-tab


sudo startxfce4 -X xiwi-tabUpdate: I had performance degradation, so i had to remove xiwi.
command to do that is
sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -u -t xorg

As the post reads, here is what i did to be able control the volume from when i am inside XFCE on the chromebook- i basically set keyboard shortcuts to the chromebook volume controls.


Go to 'Keyboard' settingsGo to the 'Application Shortcuts' tabClick Addenter the command in the text boxclick 'OK'. you will get a notification to select the key to use. click the button you want
Increase volume command: amixer set Master 5%+ 

Decrease volume command:
amixer set Master 5%-

Mute / un-Mute command:
amixer set Master toggle

I recently bought myself a Google Pixel 2 XL Panda phone and a few days into the using the phone i noticed some issues with the uploads. I had no clue what was happening as my downloads on WIFI were 100+ Mbps, but the upload was in kbps which was weird.

I reset my phone and still had no way to understand what was going on. Went to the target store near my place and was able to run another speedtest on the target free wifi and noticed that the uploads were working, which meant the issue was related to the WIFI at my place.

After a few hours of digging on the internet, i found that few other people had the same issue with the DDWRT routers they were using due to an older version. I realized that i was running an early 2014 version of the software which could the cause of the issue and once i updated it to the 2018 version, all my issues were solved.

So if you face the same issue, it could just be the router.