Sure, drop me a note with the details and I’ll see if I can give you a hand. I’m not super expert in all the specifics of the Chromebook ecosystem, but I have good general computer/Unix skills and have hacked a couple so I know where to look for resources.
As expected from the docs, that’s why I was surprised to see you mention Nix on a Chromebook, it seemed like order of magnitude wrong. 128GB is an unusual amount of local storage for a Chromebook.
I have a little Arch/Hyprland install that fits a comfortable environment in like 8 of the 16GB in my Dell 3189 right now - It was kind of a fun project fitting it and chasing down all the little annoyances, I think it all works now other than the lack of pluming to make use of the fold sensors, and an occasional ASoC bug for which patches have landed upstream in Linux or Pipewire since the last releases.
How is NixOS on a Chromebook? The Chromebook I’ve been hacking on exists as a beater for trying environments without disrupting the (principally Arch+KDE on X) boxes I do my real work on, and I was thinking about trying Nix on it, but it seemed like the combination of 16GB eMMC and Nix’s propensity for large disc usage would make that difficult.
I just tried keyd a day or two ago and I’m super taken with it.
I just wanted to make Meta+Arrows generate PgUp/PgDn/Home/End because I’ve really grown to like laptops that do that with Fn (And I was playing with a hacked Chromebook whose keyboard does those soft with Ctrl+Shift+Arrow in software on ChromeOS so you’ve got to do something).
I’m quite impressed. The configuration format is sane, the daemon’s runtime footprint is tiny, and it works across VTs, X, and Wayland because it’s a virtual keyboard emitting events. The historical options have like…0-1 of those properties. Also the virtual keyboard takes bus ID 0fac:0ade, and who doesn’t like a god hex pun.
Relevant place to ask: I’ve been trying to find a reference for the earliest Emacs that could host a terminal emulator or subshell in a window.
Multics emacs appears to have had both split windows and a character-at-a-time input and output mode as far back as 1978 for use as a SUPDUP and/or TELNET client, which is currently the earliest I’m aware of. Ancient ITS TECO EMACS had splits pretty early on, and may have sprung the necessary character plumbing earlier - but I’ve never found any reference material to confirm/deny.
It’s a fringe to a larger interest, which is that I’ve been trying to document the history of terminal multiplexers, especially in the Window (1986)-Screen(1987)-Tmux(2007) tradition (as opposed to the historical meaning which we’d call terminal servers). I’m slowly becoming convinced they came about after the advent of floating window GUIs hosting multiple terminal emulators. If you were super connected and could get access to one, sometime fairly early in the window between the 1973 introduction of the Alto and the surviving 1979 manuals the Alto program “Chat” could run multiple telnet sessions in floating windows (I’m also looking for a more precise date for when Bob Sproull made Chat able to do that trick). Several other early graphical systems like Blit terminals (1982 inside Bell, commercial as the 5620 in 1984) and early Sun Windowing System of early SunOS (1983) could also do multiple floating terminal emulators, so they were common by the early 80s.
Because the 36-bit DEC lineage had pretty robust psuedoterminals all the way back into the mid 1960s ref, a lot of hackers did a lot of fun shit on PDP-10s with ITS and TENEX and WAITS, and Stanford and MIT had PDP-10s connected to fancy video terminals by the mid 70s, it’s IMO the most likely place for the first terminal multiplexers to emerge… if I could just find some documentation or dated code or accounts.
Most Chromebook’s firmware is Coreboot, but it’s running a Depthcharge payload instead of UEFI (or BIOS or whatever). Mr. Chromebox maintains UEFI Coreboot payloads and install tools for a wide variety of (x86) Chromebooks, which can be used to flash a normal UEFI payload and boot normal OSes. It’s strictly possible to boot normal Linux systems on a the Depthcharge payload modern Chromebooks use, but uh… here’s the gentoo wiki on it, it’s a substantial pain in the ass.
I’m somewhat surprised to learn that each Snowmobile unit is only about 100PB in a 45x8x9.6ft highwall shipping container
Gonna ballpark in stupid units to see how wrong my intuition that that’s not very dense is:
Assuming dense but not hot new thing spinning rust, 16TB per 34.5 cubic inch standard 3.5" disc.
(100PB/16TB)*2 (assume at least two spindle redundant) is about 12,000 discs, so about 414,000 cubic inches of just discs without any of the supporting equipment.
A highwall shipping container is like 5,900,000 cubic inches, so only like 7% of that thing would be discs.
Or, accommodating a little bit of the support, let’s say it’s just full of those commodity 90-bay 4U storage servers. Those are 19" x 7" x 26.4" (3511.2 cubic inches) for 1440 raw TB each, again 2 spindle redundancy so you’d need about 140 of the things for 100PB, round up to 500,000 cubic inches of those… still less than 9%.
Yeah, unless I did my math radically wrong, that’s surprisingly not very dense.
Oh, it is, I just meant my instance has had its keys rebound so I haven’t run into that problem.
When last I looked miniflux wasn’t quite as featured a solution as I’m looking for (I keep a lot of notes and such embedded in my DB), but it is pleasingly simple.
Ah, I’ve had the googlereaderkeys plugin enabled forever so I don’t even know what their default keybinds are. Unless I see something super compelling (or a serious problem with tt-rss and its ecosystem) I’m unlikely to change, but I like to keep my ear to the ground on the space.
Since you’ve used both, what are your feelings on FreshRSS vs. tt-rss?
Around the death of google reader, I set up a tt-rss instance, imported all my saved stuff, and I’ve been using it continuously since (I’m technically in an unsupported configuration because I set it up long before docker became the preferred then only supported configuration, but it just keeps ticking installed like a normal piece of software on a rented VM).
I’m generally super pleased, and it’s my primary mode of content consumption via browser + Android App, and I use the “note” and “share with note” features pretty extensively to plumb to some other folks with similar setups.
Fox (the main tt-rss dev) is clearly an asshole, and there are some geopolitical complications because he’s a Russian national, but he’s made an excellent focused piece of software. I’ve considered looking seriously in to FreshRSS, but have a lot of inertia and at a glance it looks like it’s missing a few features.
I was so annoyed by the dialog-buttons-in-title-bar nonsense that I ended up replacing my system gtk3 package with gtk3-classic the first time I used gimp after the 3.0 upgrade. It fixes some other bizarre gnome-isms so GTK3 software is less-jarring under KDE (or …anything not gnome).