On the last post I made mention that I bought a Chromebook. I was able to test the application and as it turned out I was not able to get it installed following the directions we had sent. Again, this is where the hardware specifications matter a little bit. I don’t know what they were running so it will be interesting to see what they used.
The one I got is a Dell Chromebook 3189. Yeah. Pretty old one but it was cheap and that’s the main reason I got it. I knew right away I would be installing a different operating system as well so having a top of the line machine was not a priority for this. It was more for light things like browsing the web, making some code changes here and there, and maybe testing other operating systems.
The good news being I was able to get Zorin OS installed and running. It’s what I’m using for now and will be for the next two weeks. I was also able to get Ubuntu up and running, and tried to see how Chrome OS Flex would behave on the machine.
To be honest, I did like it a bit but I don’t think I would keep it as my personal usage one. The cool part is that I can also make the swap over to Fedora if I really wanted to for the machine. I have really liked using Fedora as my main operating system too for a long time now. I actually don’t even remember how long I’ve been using it.
Now, the getting the operating system to install was a little tricky at first. The reason I say this is because I have never done this before so I had to look up the step I needed to take. There are several videos out there too that sort of helped out with this little journey I went on. I wound up looking at like 4 different ones too.
With Zorin OS installed on the machine I will be trying it out for the next two weeks to see how I like it on the Chromebook. If things go well, I’ll keep running it otherwise I may look for a different one that I may like.
I think the bigger thing here will be for maybe building out some firmware for keyboards or even just some random project that I find on the web and want to build out. I think this may be the next thing I look into as well since I will have some extra micro controllers that I can mess around with. I’ll need to get the environments for those so research time for that.
I will say this has been fairly fun so far and I’m glad I am able to do this on my spare time as well. I’m very much looking forward to building out my keyboard next though so that will probably be next on the list of things to finish.