Linux

As a 'power user' who wanted to replace my laptop with something inexpensive and low maintenance, I gave a Chromebook an honest try. Was it up to the challenge?

This is the first post in a 3-part series on using a Chromebook as a power user. It gives a high-level overview of how I'm using my Chromebook and some basic Chrome OS configuration steps. Part 2 digs deeper to show advanced users how to use crouton to install Debian Linux in a chroot. Part 3 finishes up by configuring LXDE and connecting to a remote FreeBSD desktop running xrdp.

The RDP apps on Chrome OS left me wondering if my Chromebook would be useless. Then I found crouton and installed Debian Linux in a chroot to expand my options.

This is the 2nd post in a 3-part series on using a Chromebook as a power user. Part 1 gave a high-level overview of how I'm using my Chromebook and some basic Chrome OS configuration steps. This post digs deeper to show advanced users how to use crouton to install Debian Linux in a chroot. Part 3 finishes up by configuring LXDE and connecting to a remote FreeBSD desktop running xrdp.

FreeBSD's root user can easily search its shell command history using the arrow keys. Add the same search capability in the Bash shell with this change.

By default, the FreeBSD root user can type part of a command and then search through history for previous commands beginning with those characters using the up/down arrow keys. If you're new to FreeBSD or csh, you might think the convenient shell history search is specific to root or csh/tcsh. Fortunately, it's not. You can get similar functionality in Bash by creating or editing ~/.inputrc to add the following lines:

After installing Debian Linux in a chroot on my Chromebook, I slimmed LXDE down a bit before connecting to my FreeBSD desktop running xrdp.

This is the final post in a 3-part series on using a Chromebook as a power user. Part 1 gave a high-level overview of how I'm using my Chromebook and some basic Chrome OS configuration steps. Part 2 dug deeper to show advanced users how to use crouton to install Debian Linux in a chroot. This post finishes up by configuring LXDE and connecting to a remote FreeBSD desktop running xrdp.

Create shell aliases to quickly search reference sites from a terminal including DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, AcronymFinder, Devhints, and FreshPorts.

I listened to episode #283 of The Changelog this week and learned about Devhints, which provides "cheatsheets" on a variety of development related topics. The hosts mentioned that the site looks good in Lynx, the text-based browser, but still asked about a shell script to parse it. I thought a shell script would be overkill: why not a simple alias that searches the site in Lynx?