[dba-Tech] Want a real cheap working Laptop

Hi All:

For all those who want a real cheap Laptop and have all the functionality so
you can do real programming check out the following:

First get a Chromebook. The price runs from $199 to $299. Interestingly,
everything on the notebook automatically backs itself up on the Cloud.
http://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/chrome/devices/#foreveryone-promo-samsung

The Chromebook OS is cute but hardly an OS for developers, enter a OSS
package called Crouton:
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

The following instructing will be how get a full Linux style environment
installed:

<Quote>
"... Getting started with CROUTON

The first thing to do is boot the Chromebook into Developer Mode. Doing this
will wipe the device, but that doesn't really matter because everything is
backed up to the cloud and gets synced back down when you log in.  This is
the process I had to follow for my model, and yours may be a little
different - just Google for it. You don't need to worry about setting up the
firmware to boot from USB. Once you are in Developer Mode, sign in and hit
Ctrl + Alt + T to fire up the shell. Type shell to be dropped into a BASH
environment. At this point you need to follow the directions in Crouton's
README, but here's a quick rundown of what you need to do in the shell we
just opened:

1  sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t unity

Go for a walk at this point - this will download about 700 MB of files. Once
the process is complete, you will be prompted for the root user name
password. Enter that, a few other bits of user info, and you're done! Since
we installed Unity, we can fire that up with:

The `-b` backgrounds the process.  You can omit it.
2  sudo startunity -b

You can switch between the Chrome OS and Ubuntu environments with ctrl + alt
+ shift + F1 (the "back" button) and ctrl + alt + shift + F2 (forward),
respectively.

That's it! Now you can run Ubuntu apps inside of Chrome OS.

Setting up a development environment

The previous section was for setting up an Ubuntu chroot, this section is
for setting up some tools that are useful for web development.


GIT
You need Git. 'Nuff said.

1  sudo apt-get install git


VIM WITH RUBY SUPPORT

Command-T, a Vim plugin I use, depends on Ruby support. Because of this, I
needed to compile Vim with Ruby support enabled. The Ubuntu chroot that
Crouton installed lacks a few of the dependencies that a Ruby-enabled Vim
requires, so I had to install those myself:

1  sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev ruby-dev

>From here I followed this guide written by Krešimir Bojčić , but here's the
part that actually gets and compiles the source code into an executable:

1  # Vim is in a Mercurial repository.
2  sudo apt-get install mercurial
3
4  hg clone https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/ ~/vim
5  cd ~/vim
6  hg update -C v7-3-154
7  ./configure --with-features=huge  --disable-largefile \
8              --enable-perlinterp   --enable-pythoninterp \
9              --enable-rubyinterp   --enable-gui=gtk2 \
10
11 make
12 sudo make install

Now your Vim has Ruby support!


OpenSSH

Another critical tool for me is OpenSSH, because I like to SSH into my
Ubuntu environment from Chrome and not deal with Unity any more than I have
to. The easiest way to do this is to install tasksel and install OpenSSH
from there:

1  sudo apt-get install tasksel
2  sudo tasksel

tasksel gives you a UI to select a number of packages you'd like to install,
including OpenSSH. You can also easily install a LAMP stack from this UI, if
you'd like.


NODE.JS

Yup, you can run NodeJS from Chrome OS. It's as simple as:

1  sudo apt-get install nodejs npm


FULL-STACK DEVELOPMENT FOR $250

The Chromebook is an amazing little device. By running an Ubuntu chroot, you
have all the tools you need to build a web project from scratch, and
probably a lot more. Keep in mind that it has an ARM instruction set, so
some programs may not work (or at least need to be compiled from source). I
haven't had any hangups that I couldn't fix, however. Why is this worth the
trouble? Personally, I just like little computers. It's also great to have a
SSD-powered laptop that has no moving parts - not even a fan. A soft benefit
of having such an inexpensive device is the peace of mind of not lugging
around a $2000+ laptop with you to the coffee shop. The 11-inch screen is
reasonably comfortable to code on and the battery life is great. The
Chromebook feels like a poor man's MacBook Air, and with a full-featured
local development environment, I can safely depend on it wherever I go..."
</Quote>

Development on a budget even with a full Ubuntu 12.04 desktop. Cool and so
cheap. 

Jim