Years ago, before Google and I stopped seeing eye-to-eye, I bought an Asus Chromebook C100P. It’s a great, cheap little machine with mediocre specs and decent battery life that was good for browsing the web and not much else. I had originally intended to get a lightweight laptop for writing away from my desk, but the simplicity of Chrome OS just wasn’t enough for me, so this little guy has been sitting in a drawer for the better part of three years.

But, I hate waste.

I hate that I have a perfectly good machine sitting around doing nothing, and I hate that I have been allowing it to languish for so long. Thankfully, the Gopherverse has given me a renewed drive to create new value out of the old tech in my life, so I’ve spent the last few days looking into options for reviving this thing and extracting more value out of it.

After a few false starts installing Arch and Debian on an external SD card (spoiler: it works, but not in a way that is useful), I came across Crouton, a brilliant little project that lets you run Linux in a chroot on a Chromebook.

I won’t go into the installation steps, as the Crouton GitHub page does a great job walking you through that process, but I will say that everything works out of the gate without any issue. With some experimentation, I landed on a simple LXDE desktop environment running Ubuntu Xenial (I know, old school, but so far I’m only using this thing to write this phlog post.

I’ll figure out what more to do with it later, but in the mean time it’ll serve nicely as little portable gopher client; and, just for posterity, here is its neofetch (with the small logo variant to fit my 68 character column limit):

         _    crlf@localhost
     ---(_)   ----------------
 _/  ---  \   OS: Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS on Chrome OS armv7l
(_) |   |     Host: Google Minnie
  \  --- _/   Kernel: 4.19.122-09119-gb1efef1fec5e
     ---(_)   Uptime: 13 hours, 31 mins
              Packages: 1086 (dpkg)
              Shell: bash 4.3.48
              Resolution: 1280x800
              DE: LXDE
              WM: Openbox
              WM Theme: Bear2
              Theme: Adwaita [GTK3]
              Icons: Adwaita [GTK3]
              Terminal: lxterminal
              Terminal Font: Monospace 12
              CPU: Rockchip (Device Tree) (4) @ 1.800GHz
              Memory: 1720MiB / 2014MiB