Useful comment posted from Chrome team member Jen:<p><i>I’m a Chrome team member and saw this going around Twitter.<p>Just wanted to say, you can right-click on the Cr-48 by tapping with two fingers (or holding Alt and single clicking).<p>You can also flip the developer mode switch under the device and get full access to a shell: <a href="http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device" rel="nofollow">http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device</a><p>hope this resolves some of the comments!</i>
Keep in mind, while reading this, that the Cr-48 is a beta product of sorts. So the mentioned hardware faults will most likely be fixed when this thing actually ships.<p>Somewhat unrelated:<p><i>Right now my ideal laptop would be: Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G.</i><p>I couldn't agree more, that really would be a perfect laptop.
<i>The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one.... Surprisingly the laptop arrived this morning and I’ve been having fun putting it through its paces.</i><p>Oh stop being humble. :P I don't think it's surprising in the least that the creator of JQuery was able to snag a Cr-48. ;)
If you run "Shell In A Box" on the server you can browse to a full bash prompt in a browser tab. It even has Tab-completion and works with ncurses apps too.<p>You just run a tiny daemon and then connect to it such as <a href="https://192.168.1.1:4200" rel="nofollow">https://192.168.1.1:4200</a><p><a href="http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/</a>
Basic summary:<p>Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac.<p>Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? <i>That means a good terminal application</i>.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others]<p>Not <i>too</i> surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over <i>everything</i> because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.
<p><pre><code> I wanted to quickly crunch some numbers and went looking
for a calculator. Surprisingly there wasn’t one in the
store. I ended up having to use the JavaScript console to
do the calculations – which, I suspect, is not what
Google expects most users to do.
</code></pre>
But Google Search is a calculator!
This seems like what to expect at this stage. Something to dismiss as a toy because you can't create anything serious on it... yet.<p>There has to be a reason Google is bundling Flash on this thing, and I bet the reason is not that Google thinks Flash is so awesome. That has to be the first part of a trade with Adobe.<p>I guess we'll find out how photoshop.com with NaCL plugins works out. :)
"The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one."<p>I would think that someone as high profile as John Resig could get one pretty easily. (actually he did! I mean without filling out the same form as "normal" people) Maybe it shows that he's too humble to ask for one directly...
" I’d love to be able to have access to a shell and the ability to install vim + screen + git + a web server"<p>I can't help thinking thats beside the point and exactly what google are not designing this for.
When the first Cr-48 reviews popped up, I had exactly this question: "What kind of setup would you want for development?" (Or maybe writing papers in TeX.) ymacs seems like a good start for a web-based editor, but it is useless without filesystem support (C-x C-f directly to Dropbox?) Without ssh'ing into a home box somewhere, I'm not sure what the cloud-based compile/execute/debug development model is supposed to be.<p>Any other ideas what development should look like in the idea cloud-based world?
<i>Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G. I would use that laptop until the end of time.</i><p>I just replaced the HD on my 13" Macbook with an SSD, but I haven't seen anything about replacing the DVD with a battery. I do have an external laptop battery with a home made magsafe connector and a portable 4G hotspot. I suspect that this setup is only going to last about a year or so longer, though.
As someone who spends a lot of time doing UI dev work, I need to open up photoshop and cut up PSDs into CSS quite a bit..<p>The ability to run a terminal and local PHP or Django are also biggies, but other than that I don't need much of an OS. Everything else I use on a day to day basis is cloud based anyhow<p>Eagerly awaiting the day I can break free of the desktop os for good
Still waiting for mine. I knew I should have used John Resig as my alias!<p>Too bad about the terminal and *nix tools. I guess I'll have to use something like Cloud9 IDE to code. I'm really looking forward to the free 3g, though. That and the old black macbook feel.
I love the idea of mapping caps lock to ctrl + t to make it a new tab button my normal boring laptop. I'm currently looking for an app which will allow that, or a Chrome extension which allows this - anyone have an idea?