Vim, rdesktop, external monitors, and X Forwarding on a Google CR-48

While there are my other impressive hacks going around for the CR-48 (minecraft, ubuntu) I needed a few utilities that were more pragmatic. The following assumes that your CR-48 is in developer mode and you have a basic understanding of bash, scp, and compiling source code under GNU/Linux.

Vim

When I first went into the developer shell I saw approximately 1000 different binaries to run, but not one of them was a text editor. Eventually I stumbled upon qemacs, but we're just on a CR-48 not the middle ages. It was time to figure out how to get vim up and running.

Although ChromeOS is it's own GNU/Linux distro, it appears to mimic Debian/Ubuntu and is adhering somewhat to the LSB. I first just tried a straight copy of the vim binary from a Ubuntu 10.04 system but after some investigating with ldd saw it had a lot of shared libraries that weren't available on the CR-48 (most notably libselinux.so). So the quickest way to get around this was to build a static binary on a 32-bit Debian host (Ubuntu works as well).

On a 32-bit Debian Squeeze I downloaded latest VIM source code and built a static binary with a limited set of features and disabling GUI and selinux options:

USER@DEBIAN ~ $ wget ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/vim-7.3.tar.bz2
USER@DEBIAN ~ $ tar -xvjf vim-7.3.tar.bz2
USER@DEBIAN ~ $ cd vim73
USER@DEBIAN ~ $ export LDFLAGS=-static
USER@DEBIAN ~ $ ./configure --with-features=small --disable-gui --with-vim-name=vi --disable-selinux
USER@DEBIAN ~ $ make

This will make a static binary called vi in the src directory. On the CR-48 in /home/chronos/user make a directory called bin and scp the vi binary to it.

Try and execute it, but you'll get a Permission Denied error because by default the /home/chronos/user directory is mounted with the noexec option. Fix this by remounting it with exec.

chronos@localhost ~ $ sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user

Now the binary will run and you have a basic vi editor.

rdesktop

Rdesktop is much easier to put on the CR-48 since all of the libraries are available. From a 32-bit Debian/Ubuntu host, or by downloading the rdesktop i686 package from packages.debian.org, copy the rdesktop binary to the /home/chronos/user/bin directory. If it's mounted with exec then it will just run. Pass it whatever options you like, and it will open a new GUI window on the CR-48, completely independent of the Chrome UI and any shells.

chronos@localhost ~ $ ~/bin/rdesktop -u USERNAME -g 1280x800 -K -z -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD HOSTNAME

Copy/paste works well, although the arrow keys may not function properly due to the keymap not getting set correctly. This may be due to a libiconv issue and I'll need to spend some more time figuring it out.

External Monitors

While the CR-48 works just fine with it's VGA output without much tweaking, you'll either need to sign in/out or reboot the laptop for it to display to an external monitor. In dev mode xrandr is available making it easy to switch between display resolutions.

Mirror to a monitor that can do 1024x768:

chronos@localhost ~ $ xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x768 --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768

Turn off the external display and reset the CR-48 display back to the default 1280x800:

chronos@localhost ~ $ xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1280x800 --output VGA1 --off

X Forwarding

The simplest piece to enable is X-forwarding from a remote X client. Connect over ssh with the& -Y option and run any X applications:

chronos@localhost ~ $ ssh -Y USER@HOSTNAME

Bringing It All Together

Now that all the binaries are in place let's set it up so they work across reboots.

Edit /home/chronos/user/.bashrc with our new vi editor and append the following:

#Setup our environment
source ~/.bash_aliases
PATH=$PATH:~/bin

#Remount /home/chronos/user as exec so anything in ~/bin runs
sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user

Create a /home/chronos/user/.bash_aliases and add in any aliases:

alias rdesktop-home='~/bin/rdesktop -g 1280x800 -u USER -K -z -r clipboard=PRIMARYCLIPBOARD HOSTNAME'
alias projon='xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x768 --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768'
alias projoff='xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1280x800 --output VGA1 --off'
alias ssh-host='ssh -Y USER@HOSTNAME'

Now you have a much more flexible environment to add your own aliases, functions, and binaries.

Where is Old Google Keyword Adwords Tool?

Google recently upgraded their keyword Adwords tool and their user interface has significant improvement. However it no longer allows me to show results for ONLY the keywords I entered, which was allowed in the old interface. I tried to find the old keyword tool and eventually found it. To save you some trouble here's the url to the old Google Adwords keyword tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?forceLegacy=true

For those who don't know how to show results for only the keywords you've entered, do the following:

* Uncheck "Use Synonyms"
* Expand "Filter my results" and check "Don't show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered."

I don't know how much longer they'll support this legacy interface, so use it while you can! I assume the new version will include everything the legacy one offers, but who knows.

Quick GMail Note Trick

Been a while since my last post, but I'm planning to start writing some more. To start off with I wanted to share a little trick I've been using with Gmail for the past week.

Whenever I want to note an interesting page I usually use del.icio.us to tag it and keep it around. However, I'm always writing little notes to myself with what I did to get this or that working, and del.icio.us isn't really designed for that task. Instead I write myself emails, and make sure they're seeded with keywords so when I need to search for them they come up. I could use Google Notebook for this, but I find it easier to shoot off an email instead. The trick I started using is the google +addresssing feature. Normally it's used for creating a spam address, but I found adding a +notes and then creating a filter to label it as a note and remove it from the inbox is a fast and easy way to keep them all organized.