Your ISP could be Google!

Finally, my favorite company is going to step up the internet game.

Everyone seems to always complain about their ISP and for good reason. I've had three in my life:

AOL (Now part of Time Warner Cable)
Comcast
Time Warner Cable

The last two are who I want to talk about. Comcast's service was pretty good actually. I can't remember having downtime that last very long (except due to winter storms) and their customer support was... meh.

However, recently they started a 250 GB limit per household and that has a lot of people pissed off and for good reason. Prices go up, speed goes down, and now a download limit...

Now Time Warner Cable... Where to begin? They're service is very flaky, customer support personal are rude and unintelligent. They're sales people are commissioned based and therefore are really pushy. I'm also supposed to get about 12 Mb/s down but the reality is closer to 7. That's almost half! But, even though they're a terrible company, what can you do?

At this moment nothing. DSL is the only other option and the speeds are even slower... But there is some light at the end of the tunnel! Google is promising 1Gb/s connections. Yeah, you didn't read that wrong. ONE GIGABIT PER SECOND. That's freaking awesome. Even if they only get a fourth of that to my house, my current network couldn't handle it. I'd finally have to switch to a N router and a gigabit switch.

Oh man! One can only dream that they'd bring to my area. :3 I've already signed up Hamilton, Ohio but I encourage you to sign your community up here

Beagle Board Carputer

In case you haven't heard, Texas Instruments and Digi-Key have come together to create an amazing product called the Beagle Board.

What's so amazing you ask?

For a mere 150 dollars, you can get an entire computer. Albeit you have to do a lot of work to get it up and running.

Carputer systems are not a very popular mod for obvious reasons. You have to rig up a power supply, have a touch screen or voice activated interface, run the sound to your speakers, etc etc.

However, I am going to take on this challenge. Well, I'm going to wait until spring, but then I'm talking on this challenge.

Probably the most important thing I need to decide is what operating system I'm going to run on it. It can't be a conventional operating system because of the ARM architecture. That does leave me with a few things though. I could go with Windows CE (yeah right) or Android (a good possibility) or I could build it my self from Gentoo or Debian (Gentoo has a much better chance).

What I'm really hoping for is an Arch Linux port to ARM by the time I start my project. Some progress has been made over at Arch Mobile but it looks like the project may have died.

Oh well, I guess I can live with Gentoo or Android if I have to.

So let's over the two most likely options, here are some Pros and Cons:

Gentoo

Pros
I'll be able to build it how I want.
It'll be highly optimized and incredibly fast and compact.
Incredible documentation.

Cons
I've done a Gentoo install in a VirtualBox. It takes forever... I can't imagine how long it'll take on an ARM processor

Android

Pros
Already set up.
Probably easy to install.

Cons
Can't use Google apps (you have to have a license) this includes the app store.
Not sure how I'd compile programs on to it.
I don't think the interface would be that great as a carputer.

Ah well, I got plenty of time to come up with a solution.

Chrome beta released for Linux

If you've been using Linux, but wanted to use the Google branded Chrome browser, you've been out of luck.

Let me explain. The Chromium builds have been available for a long time, but not the Google Branded version you know as Chrome.

Well, I got an email this morning letting me know that it's available for beta testing!

Of course, .deb and .rpm files are available, which means that people like me (Archers) won't be able to have the Google branded version (at least not now).

Oh well, the chromium builds are more bleeding edge anyway, something that I pride myself in being as an Archer.

If anyone gives it a shot let me know.

Chrome OS source code available!

Wow! I can't believe this hasn't got bigger news! As of this writing, the source code has been available for 8 days and I've only seen this one site announcing it. Not only that, but it only has 1 Digg! Really?

This is incredible. As soon as I finish this blog post I'm going to download it and compile it! Maybe I'll set up a binary file for all my (who am I kidding?) readers.

Definitely would recommend you check out the source link if you want to compile it yourself.

EDIT:

So I got lazy and downloaded an IMG from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

Here's a quick tutorial on how to set it up in Virtual Box in Linux.

Download the file from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ (I chose to do the torrent way and was getting around 1 megabyte a second down)

Make a new directory for your extracted file. I called my chrome-os but you can call it whatever.

mkdir ~/chrome-os

Now, when I download things, I have them sent to my ~/downloads directory. Your directory might be different. (In Ubuntu, the directory is ~/Downloads note the capital "D")

We need to move the ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz to the new directory we created.

mv ~/downloads/ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz ~/chrome-os

Now we move into the directory.

cd ~/chrome-os

And unpack it...

tar -xvvzf ChromeOS-Cherry.tar.gz

That will create "ChromeOS-Cherry.img"

Here you have to options. We could just turn the .IMG into a VirtualBox harddrive, or we could burn it to a USB. I'll go over the former first.

To turn the .IMG directly into a VirtualBox harddrive we run

VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI ChromeOS-Cherry.img chrome-os.vdi

Awesome!

Now we just need to make a new instance in VirtualBox and attach the hard drive!

The second way is to burn it to a USB.

WARNING: THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON YOUR USB.

sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/X bs=4M

Where "X" is your usb drive (typically sdb or sdc depending on your setup)