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- 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.