Google Laptop!

Last night (well, tuesday night) I came home and there was a package waiting for me.  I figured it was something from Amazon that I had a recurring subscription for, but alas, it was not.  Instead, it was a Google ChromiumOS Laptop!  OMG WOOHOO!!

And though I was going to play with it in stock form for a while, I ended up not being able to wait 24 hours before putting it into dev mode and installing ubuntu.  Mainly because I wanted to use this thing as a megasquirt tune box running Megatunix.  And so far, Megatunix runs and everything - I haven't hooked it up to the keyspan I've got nor to the actual megasquirt box, but that will come soon enough.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this little laptop. It's a bit smaller than I'd honestly prefer, but it has most of the features I'd want in a laptop (plus a SSD!).  It's reasonably fast, though it could probably use a bit more ram even under linux.  No cdrom, but honestly that isn't as big of an issue as you might think.  Most everything can be dropped onto a usb stick or sd card, and this has both a usb (just one!) and a sd card slot.  It wakes up instantly, and even when shut down completely it takes maybe 5 seconds to boot to a login screen.

I think the biggest thing it has going for it is that now I won't have to turn on the behemoth of a desktop (quad-core, 8gb ram, 2+tb storage, dual monitors, beefy video card) every time I want to simply browse the web.  My phone does a reasonably decent job of that, but even a 4" screen is sometimes too small.