Samsung Dex is a Samsung solution to let one interact with your phone on a full size display, either with a dedicated dock or a software application. I’ve always though about getting one, but the use cases were pretty mimimal, thus making the $100 spend a little hard to stomach.
Last night I found myself in our office at home with no laptop. I almost went through with purchasing a dock, but then found a reseller that had a “Dex Compatible” dock that looked suspiciously like a plain USB-C hub.
With a recent update to 89.0.4389.82 of ChromeOS, there was also an update to the underlying container that hosts Linux. Normally if this happens it’s a relatively short process. However, a few days ago this took far longer, and ended up with a “Error starting penguin container: 58” message. Not helpful at all! Fortunately with some searching, I found the solution on Masaki Muranaka’s blog. The article is in Japanese, but fortunately Google translate was able to work well enough for me to get the steps necessary to fix the issue.
A few months ago I noticed a weird issue on the Chromebook where it would reboot hard if I performed a dd operation to write a Linux distro out to USB. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Browsing around the crouton source code for an unrelated project, I came across this section of code that explains the issue. The Chromebook OS has the hunk_task_panic timer set for 2 minutes.
The ChromeOS has been a great experience so far. One problem, however, is that you generally need to purchase a Chromebook to use it, or go through compiling the ChromeOS from source. A few days ago I came across Neverware’s CloudReady, which provides an freely available (to individuals) ChromeOS experience on generic hardware.
Cloudready, however, does not support dual boot, so it will wipe away anything on the machine. Following some hints from this page I was able to get the CloudReady to install on a Virtualbox VM, without the need to create a USB bootable drive.
I’m still compiling my large list of tasks, and hope to break them out blog posts/wiki documents. But the coolest thing I’ve come across so far is that the Chromebook can open up Rar files! Rar compressed files are not too common, but nice to know it’s one less item I’ll have to depend on another machine to perform.
Due to the alignment of some stars financially, I went out and obtained a Chromebook for practically free! Specifically I am getting a Toshiba Chromebook 2. Although I tend to lean more toward open source OSes and non-cloud services, I want to explore the feasibility of actually using a lightweight laptop for regular purposes. Specifically I will be focusing around three use cases:
Normal End User Tasks. Sysadmin Tasks. Development Tasks.
Every now and then we do have to use windows. So let’s try to make it as Linux like as possible
Enabling WinRM As Ansible leverages WinRM for managing Windows servers, it’s guide below provides a lot of helpful guidance:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/windows_setup.html
The TL;DR is to use the following snippet below to run a powershell script that will correctly enable WinRM for the system:
$url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/examples/scripts/ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1" $file = "$env:temp\ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1" (New-Object -TypeName System.
A complete desktop environment utilizing the command line
ASCIINema: An ingenious way to share a text-based walkthrough/presentation Source along with Javascript Player Source and Webcast Server Source AsciiFlow - Not really a CLI App, but a handle ASCII chart design tool. SSH Access Pure SSH Javascript SSH for public console, with SSO Command Environment bash tmux to allow easy multi-tasking, or perhaps byobu Modern Unix Commands ripgrep-all: Ripgrep, that also searches PDFs, eBooks, Office Docs, etc.
General Workstations (Cloud) Asana: The main task tracker we use at home Asana CLI: Asana CLI in Go. Asana Project Mover: Move projects between workspaces GifCAP: Completely client based animated GIF capture tool! Source code Linux Workstations Ultra-Geek Workstation Guide: Really good overview of hardware/software for Workstations Nix Configs: An example of a nicely modularized nix configuration Windows Workstations Source
Nitenite: Simple installation wizard for new installs Remote Support MeshCentral RustDesk