My initial review of a chromebook was pretty damning. Having explored it extensively over the last year, I feel compelled to offer a revision. The ChromeOS is still a failed paradigm. My central complaint stands: offline access and applications remain fundamental in a lot of interesting places, like other countries, the ocean, or Mars.

The machine itself, with the right software, is killer. To the point that I have no desire to purchase a macbook, thinkpad, or any other notebook, despite not having purchased a laptop since 2008.

What swung me on the machine was Ubuntu, and specifically, open source support for the 3G driver. Along the way, I also got my first SSD (upgrading the Cr-48's paltry 16 gb to a spacious 40 gb), and became a fan of Ubuntu's Unity interface. "But that's all software!" I'll discuss the machine too.

After realizing a stock chromebook is a paperweight on foreign travel, when I returned to the States, I promptly added Ubuntu. I used Jay Lee's install originally, which relies on the Chrome kernel. I promptly decided this would work well enough, and since my 2008 MacBook still stored data on spinning rust, a $100 for a 40 GB Motorola SSD seemed palatable and made the Cr-48 under Ubuntu very useful to me. Lee's 11.04 build allowed me to still use Gnome, and I was, if not happy, sufficiently productive that this was the best thing going, especially since my work machines are under the Navy's famously broken networks.

The major downside is that while a variety of hacks were devised to get the Gobi card up, they all required reboots. Those turned a 10 second boot into a 1 minute penance five times a day. Whether you were fully emancipated from ChromeOS, or using Jay Lee's chimera, you still had to reboot to get 3G working. This was exceedingly painful if you wanted to use the Verizon wireless because you needed ChromeOS to renew your subscription, and the online renewal every month would invariably get gummed up, necessating a call to "advanced Cr-48 tech support". That's the menu option. I kid you not. Using Lee's chimera, you may have to cycle through several ChromeOS versions before getting Ubuntu back. And every once in a while, google would overwrite the stateful partition, forcing you at a minimum to rewrite the reboot shortcuts.

It was one of these times, when I mistakenly wrote a lowercase -s instead of a capital -S in a reboot shortcut, and accidently all the operating systems, when I finally found Todd Vierling's recipe, 4 months after he published it.

While Lee's work was first on the scene, and remains admirable, and no doubt influenced other critical players in this saga, I will not link to it here, because Todd Vierling's recipe is now far superior. Todd installed straight Ubuntu from a thumbdrive and leveraged Brad Gearon's work on the Gobi 3G driver and firmware, allowing Ubuntu to directly and completely manage the device even after reboots and suspend/resume cycles. 

I would be remiss if I omitted the extraordinary value of the Cr-48 wiki. If you own a chromebook and haven't found the Cr-48 wiki, go there now. If you're interested in following Todd's recipe, you'll need the wiki's directions on flashing your BIOS, switching to developer mode, etc.

"But you mentioned Unity, too! That needs some explaining!" Yes, yes it does. During this same period, a friend of mind was looking at a trip to Afghanistan. He got an Acer netbook (cheap and small) and asked me to put Ubuntu on it, because Windows XP was intolerably slow. So, I did. And, wow, was the utility of Unity's space-saving obvious. With the release of Oneriec, I decided to experiment with Unity on my Chromebook as well. I definitely prefer the form factor of my Cr-48 over an Acer, and actually I like it more than my 13" MacBook as well. Now that Google has discontinued support for it's Google Desktop product (the quick search bar was roughly a Quicksilver for Linux, incidently written by Quicksilver's Nicholas Jitkoff), Unity's dash fills the keyboard-accessable launcher function, certainly better than Gnome Do or even Jitkoff's quick search bar. And the Cr-48's screen, a bit smaller than a 13" Macbook's, still manages to gain nicely from spacesaving features. The Unity dock works well for me when I want it, and stays out of the way when I don't. The designers are also doing a good job polishing the dock's hinting methods as well.

I now have a lightweight, reliable, 3G laptop with an SSD, CAC card support (critical for anyone in DoD), Citrix (critical for anyone in healthcare), Wacom support, NFS support, and great app launchers. Did I mention it's matte black plastic (great selling point for the military), and has a battery life well north of 5 hours? I have taken notes on it in conferences for up to 7 hours with all the radios off. The soft plastic finish still peels off, and I'm sure there are folks for whom a dual-core 1.67 GHz CPU is not sufficient, but I can't complain. Such things were supercomputers when I graduated college. Certainly it's plenty fast enough for most of what I do: word processing and web access. Oh, and access to the largest store of free software, ever.

I felt a little bit bad publishing my last review, seeing as Google gave me a free laptop on my birthday. But this review is not really about that. See, you can get an equivalent Lenovo, but it costs several times the Cr-48's $225 on eBay and the 40GB SSD is about $120. So for about $350 and a couple hours installing Ubuntu (which you'd still have to do with the Lenovo) and some software packages, you can get what I consider the most magical mobile workstation on the planet. That seemed like news worth sharing.