Simon's Blog

Running Chrom(ium) OS on an old EEEPC netbook

2012-01-29T09:40:00.001Z

Every since the iPad launch few years ago, it has been my choice device for accessing the web while on the move or lounging on the sofa. Before that we had netbooks and I had an Asus EEEPC 1005ha.

While the iPad is great, I had found it turned me into an internet 'consumer' and limited the amount I actually contributed as I find the on-screen keyboard is best suited for emergency typing only. So I dug out the old netbook but A) it ran Windows and B) it was really sloooow.

Ideally I wanted it to be like the iPad, but with a keyboard - You just switch it on and in a few seconds it's working and you can get on the net and browse / use SSH. I checked out all the various Linux editions before I remembered Chrome OS... would this work on the EEEPC?

Well, the answer is YES, and it only takes about 20 minutes to get up and running.

How do you install it?

Download the Chromium OS open source distribution from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ and follow their instructions on making a bootable USB stick (I used an SD card).
Stick the SD card in your EEEPC, go into the BIOS and change HDD boot order so the USB drive is top.
Save settings and restart and your EEEPC should start to boot into a Chrome OS and prompt you to select a wifi network.
At the login screen login with your usual Google credentials.
Your currently running on the SD card, to install on to the HDD, press ctrl + alt + t to launch a terminal and run /usr/sbin/chromeos-install
15 minutes later everything should be installed, reboot.

What do you get?

Pretty much what I wanted. A device that is as easy to grab and use an iPad but with a proper keyboard. Chrome (the browser) runs fast and won't be slowing down any-time soon as no additional software (or adware) is going to be installed. All bookmarks, cookies and extensions automatically synced from my Google account so you're immediately in a familiar environment. Here some interesting numbers:

Boot time from off: < 60 seconds

Resume time: 3 seconds

Battery life: 9 hours +

Summary

Chrome OS breathes new life into a laptop that would otherwise never have been used again and is great for doing the work the iPad isn't really suited for or for if you don't have or want an iPad. The real test though is when I install it on to my dad's netbook next week...

"Hey everyone, our system went down"

2011-02-26T20:51:00.000Z

Well we're almost in March and I am only onto my second blog post and haven't proceeded very far with any of the other new year resolutions either. It's been a bit of a hectic and not all positive February, which is my excuse for not updating the blog as well as not cutting down on the alcohol.

This month saw us have our first customer affecting issue in around two years of providing conference call services. Providing *reliable* conference call services is our core business and we differentiate ourselves from other low-cost teleconference providers by focusing on the audio quality and the stability of our systems, so any issue is a big deal for us.

This particular issue wasn't as bad as it could have been, our services were still available and working for the majority of customers, but some were experiencing intermittent disconnects and having to re-dial back into the conference. We had identified there was an issue before the first support ticket came in and had established the problem was with one of the providers of our UK geographic dial-in numbers. The provider (who will remain anonymous) acknowledged they had an issue and their engineers were working on it. They were unable to provide an ETA for resolution.

This left us with a difficult question that I haven't faced since my days in IT management:

Do we notify the customers?

Before I go into the thought process around this, I will let you know that we did notify our customers. We already have a policy in place that in the event of any issue we send out a service status message to all of our customers letting them know. I believe that being honest with the customers will ultimately pay off in the long run, but that still doesn't make the process any less painful.

The temptation that I had to overcome was that we have several thousand customers signed up to our services; some daily users of our services and some occasional users. If we say only 10% of our total customers are using the service at any one time (this is pretty much a guesstimate) and only 10% of those were effected by this intermittent issue, that means only 1% of our total customers would ever actually experience the problem - even less if the problem was resolved quickly.

So, we could sit quiet and deal with individual support requests from the 1% of customers that were effected and not have to admit to the other 99% that we were having issues. Or, we can send an e-mail to everybody letting them know we have problems.

The temptation to do the former was great and I have to admit that I almost faltered, but having done the later and received feedback from our user base who re-scheduled their calls as not to be effected it was definitely the right thing to do.

Whether publishing this blog post to the rest of the internet letting them know we had a problem is a good idea remains to be seen. I guess by being honest with your customer base (both current and potential) means you do not fall into the trap of not dealing with the actual issues because you got away with them the first time with good PR, deceit or by simply burying your head in the sand.

Simon 2.0

2011-01-02T15:22:00.000Z

So this is probably the fourth or fifth time I have set up a personal blog over the years, and I don't think I have ever got to writing post number 3. Hopefully this time will be different, after all it is a new year and (along with losing weight, doing more exercise and cutting down on the alcohol) contributing more to the internet is one of my resolutions.

Towards the end of last year I noticed that I had become very much a 'consumer' of the internet. I spent more time online than ever thanks to all the various mobile devices, but it was all reading, watching or listening. I realised I no longer frequented and posted on online forums, newsgroups were pretty much dead, I had managed to avoid having a Facebook account, my twitter updates were sparse to say the least and despite spending a large portion of my time reading Reddit and Hacker News I had made but a few comments to each.

In the early(ish) days of the internet, during the mid to late 1990s, I probably spent 2 or 3 hours a day online, and this was spent equally between surfing the web, posting on newsgroups and chatting on IRC or ICQ. Around 2004 when the web started to get all 'social' I was too busy to really keep up and although I kept abreast of all the technologies and up and coming startups in this area, I kind of stopped submitting any content, ignored questions I could have answered and purposefully avoided signing up to the social networks. In 2011, this is going to change.

I'm not sure why I even started the personal blogs previously, probably some kind of ego trip and when I realised nobody was reading the motivation was gone, the purpose of this blog however is a little different: I am going to use it to get me back in to habit of writing content and contributing to the internet; a sort of way to improve my writing without having to worry about editing the content or embarrasing myself. I now run my own company providing teleconference services and I want to easily and confidently be able to write relevant and timely content for the site blog, for industry websites and on forums such as linkedin, as well as give back some (hopefully) valuable content and comments to the social news websites I love so much such as Hacker News and Reddit.

So, we are on day 2 of 2011 and I have made some progress on at least one of the new years resolutions.