I installed Arch too on the raspberry pi a few days ago, and ran into a problem. Thing is my condo doesn't provide Ethernet access, only wifi. Wifi is fine but then there's this login portal that you have to get past to get net access. I spent a lot of time thinking on how to get past that since I wasn't expecting much from the minimal ISO. Thought about creating a perl script to automate that but later realized the minimal iso came with a commandline browser (elinks) and I was surprised at how well it worked.

Anyway installing arch is easy but some stuff especially setting up lvm with luks encryption along with encrypted swap is kinda tricky, but quite do-able after you test it out in a vm and write down the steps.

The OP has a good point that Valve doesn't want to disappoint with Half Life 3 but completely taking it out of the equation is stupidity. If I were to dream with an open mind, I'd say that if VR technology really takes off then gaming in VR will be a comepletely different level of experience and we might expect to see HL3. May be a year from now, may be a few years or a decade it'll definitely make a comeback that I can hope for. If not half life 3 atleast something better to replace it in some form or another.

Well you see the market is always open. Blizzard created Warcraft 3, which is an excellent game. Then came couple of modders who created a custom map of Warcraft3 called Dota and it became really hyped and popular. It became so popular that some people ran warcraft3 just to play dota.

Blizzard missed the opportunity to grab the market share with dota as they didnt bother in expanding a mod for their own game and turning it into a fully fledged game. Where as Valve being the smart asses they are understood the potential and created dota 2. And now look at Dota 2, it's one of the top revenue earning game Valve has ever created.

So who cares if Half life 3 doesn't come out? In the end it doesn't really matter as there will always be something to take its place.

Hey @yimiol thanks for the suggestion.

I've done some research related to the various processor performance of chromebooks and this is a good place to checkout their performance: http://zipso.net/chromebook-specs-comparison-table/

For the performance comparison a javascript based benchmarking tool called octane is used.

According to octane performance, the earlier generation of Toshiba chromebook 2 uses a tablet processor (n2840) and performance is around 8400.

Although I really like the screen, keyboard and build quality but I'm not really sure if it would be suitable for tasks that require a bit more processing power.

Surprisingly, the acer c720 comes with a faster processor (Intel Celeron 2955U) has octane performance of around 11,400 ~12k. Where as an i3 based processor being offered on c720 offers around 14k. There's not much difference between the two so I'm inclined more towards Celeron 2955U processor as it hits the price/performance sweet spot.

Getting c720 on amazon for ~$250 with Celeron 2995U would be an okay deal and to top it off I'm planning to get a 128GB SSD to replace the internal 16gb one  for ~$50 http://www.amazon.com/ZTC-128GB-Armor-Drive-ZTC-SM201-128G/dp/B00IZNYDBG making the purchase more practical.

What do you guys think? Is it a good investment for ~$300? I actually didn't like Toshibas offering that much, I agree they have good build quality and screen but now they're charging a premium price for it and I'm not sure if it's really worth it considering their new 2015 edition which costs > ~$500 with a processor that's a bit underpowered than the i3 http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Chromebook-CB35-C3300-Backlit-Keyboard/dp/B015806LMM/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&sr=1-1&keywords=toshiba+chromebook+2+2015.

Hi guys, reading is one of those stuff that I feel like is really important and a big chunk of what I've read in the past has been mainly on computers (Ebooks).

Few years ago, I decided to get a Kindle (Paperwhite) and it seemed actually a good way to read books whether technical or fiction or whatever and it's also really easy on the eyes.

But up until now I always just put the pdf file directly into kindle and was okay with it, but recently I discovered that the real way to read on a kindle is to use a kindle friendly format like mobi, azw3, etc.

Holyshit it opened up a whole new world for me and made me realize how stupid I was that I didn't research enough to understand this earlier. Reading on a .mobi or .azw3 format is fucking awesome, the options for line spacing / indentation, margin, font customization, word lookup, wikipedia access to selected text are all the features that are just too good that I think makes reading any book fun again. Usually reading a technical or text book from a pdf file with hundreds of blocks of cluttered text on a computer feels like a chore to me and this is the point where kindle shines in my opinion.

So far if a format is like epub, etc. it can be instantly converted to a mobi format using a tool like Calibre without any hassle, but I have a lot of pdf files and it's quite difficult or should I say impossible to get them converted to a kindle supported format since pdf format wasn't originally developed with that goal in mind. Not that pdf's dont work on kindle, they do but you have to manually zoom in / out everytime which is annoying and after a while you get so annoyed of doing this repetitive thing that you decide to squint and read the small texts and it hurts your eyes lol.

I've tried various things, the last stuff that I tried was stripping pdfs to barebones images and rescaling using k2pdfopt and finally converting to mobi using calibre. It sort of worked okay but still you don't have the customization options of a native mobi format since those are just images and not recognized as texts.

I would be interested in hearing if you guys do have other ways of converting those bloated pdf files onto some format that is more readble on a kindle, etc.

Feel free to suggest other ideas of reading, doesn't have to be a kindle, perhaps something that works for you.

Inox Browser is a privacy spinoff of Chromium, it has been rebuilt from Chromium source with custom patches in order to make it more privacy friendly. As we know even browsers like Chromium leaks data to Google's server in one way or another, therefore Inox browser project was created to address that problem.

Features (quoted directly from Inox's thread on Arch Linux forums):

Disabled Google's Instant Extended API, this has the effect that the old "New Tab" is in place. (See disable-instant-extended-api.patch)
DuckDuckGo as default search engine.            (See add-duckduckgo-seaarch-engine.patch)
Disabled AutoFill data transmission                  (See disable-autofill-download-manager.patch)
All Browser Extensions are now visible             (See modify-default-prefs.patch)
Enabled user-modification for ALL extensions  (See disable-default-extensions.patch)
Removed following default extensions:             (See disable-default-extensions.patch)
        -> Hotword (incl. Shared Module)
        -> Google Now
        -> Google Feedback
        -> Cloud Print
        -> Google Webstore
        -> Network Speech synthesis
        -> Google Hangout
Disabled URLTracker data transmission. I know this class has a bad naming, but nevertheless it connects to Google. (See disable-google-url-tracker.patch)
Disabled promo-notification fetching                     (See disable-notification-promo-fetch.patch)
Disabled ipv6 probes to google servers                (See disable-google-ipv6-probes.patch)
Disabled Google Cloud Messaging status check  (See disable-gcm-status-check.patch)
Modified default settings:                                       (See modify-default-prefs.patch)
        -> DefaultCookiesSetting: CONTENT_SETTING_SESSION_ONLY
        -> EnableHyperLinkAuditing: false
        -> CloudPrintSubmitEnabled: false
        -> NetworkPredictionEnabled: false
        -> BackgroundModeEnabled: false
        -> BlockThirdPartyCookies: true
        -> AlternateErrorPagesEnabled: false
        -> SearchSuggestEnabled: false
        -> AutofillEnabled: false
        -> "Send feedback" checkbox if user triggers settings-reset: false
        -> BuiltInDnsClientEnabled: false
        -> SignInPromoUserSkipped: true
        -> SignInPromoShowOnFirstRunAllowed: false
        -> ShowAppsShortcutInBookmarkBar: false
        -> ShowBookmarkBar: true
        -> PromptForDownload: true
        -> SafeBrowsingEnabled: false
        -> EnableTranslate: false
based on build flags:
Disabled google now:                enable_google_now=0
Disabled WebRTC:                    enable_webrtc=0
Disabled Remote service:          emable_remoting=0
Disabled safe browsing:             safe_browsing_mode=0
Disabled RLZ Identifier:              enable_rlz=0
Disabled google hangouts:         enable_hangout_services_extension=0
Disabled wifi bootstrapping:        enable_wifi_bootstrapping=0
Disabled speech input:               enable_speech_input=0
Disabled pre backups on sync:   enable_pre_sync_backup=0
Disabled print preview:                enable_print_preview=0
Disabled Chrome build:               google_chrome_build=0

Few months ago I put a lot of effort in getting it to work and for some reason I always ran into build errors, probably because it was not maintainted for a while. Now the developer behind it has updated the repository with a new build that works out of the box without any additional tinkering according to the binary build that I've tested. Building from source should work fine, but I haven't tested that.

Installing is easy if you're on Arch Linux, just grab it quick from the AUR (Arch User Repository):
yaourt -S inox-bin
Or if you're on a different distro and prefer to compile from source you can checkout the source on Github:
https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset
Now that we have the installation part out of the way let's get down to getting your extensions to work.

First of all, since Inox browser is completely detached from all Google cloud related features usually present in Chrome browsers you will notice that you will not be able to directly install extensions from Google's Webstore.

But, there is a work around for that and it's quite simple but a bit repetitive.

1) For every extension that you want to install, search for it in the Webstore, click on it and note the unique ID associated with it which you can see in the url.

For example, if you searched for Adblock Plus and clicked on that extension your url would change to this:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-plus/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb?hl=en
The ID for the above extension is cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb.


2) Now copy the unique id for your extension and add it to the url below where it says [EXTENSION_ID]:
https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&prodversion=47.0&x=id%3D[EXTENSION_ID]%26installsource%3Dondemand%26uc
In our case if we wanted to install the Adblock Plus extension it would be:
https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&prodversion=47.0&x=id%3Dcfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb%26installsource%3Dondemand%26uc
Paste that link in your browser and it'll automatically download that particular extension.


3) Now navigate to chrome://extensions tab in your browser and just drag the extension to install it.

That's it! Now do that for every extension you want to install. I know it's repetitive, perhaps I will code a simple script to automate the process but for now work with this.

So far I'm enjoying Inox browser, personally I loved Chromium and only grudge I had against it was the tracking features of Google built into it. Now, with Inox Browser I can enjoy the flexibility of a modern browser like Chrome without haviing to worry about my personal privacy.

Feel free to ask any questions and if you have build related issues, kindly direct them to the Inox Browser thread on Arch Linux forum: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198763

Enjoy!


[Update]
I was interested in figuring out what data was transmitted through Inox Browser and I used Wireshark to analyze the packets. So far, other than some of the installed extensions like LastPass, Xmarks I didn't see any extension  that tried to automatically connect to their respective site/server when the browser first started. Giving me more reasons to move away from these plugins asap.

Also I noticed there was a get request to this ip "23.51.43.27" every time I loaded my browser both in Chromium and Inox. Later I figured out it was a symantec server and my browser was probably synchronizing with the Certificate Revocation List. It's probably something that is required to blacklist invalid certificates.

Other than that I didn't notice any unsual connections, not even to Google servers which is a good thing thanks to Inox.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

I run Arch Linux on my main box and generally that's my preferred distro, but from Arch wiki I've read that actually if the Chromebook doesn't ship with SeaBios you would have to manually install that which can be kind of tricky and has the possibility of bricking your Chromebook if you're not careful. I haven't done enough research on that topic and also I've seen that for the most part people prefer to run Linux side by side ChromeOS using Crouton.

I don't have much idea about Crouton or how practical that model of running Linux  on top of ChromeOS is or if there are other side effects to that. But Crouton seems to be the easiest method so far and as of now supports Ubuntu, Debian and Kali. Initially I'll stick with Debian to get things going until I do more research and find a way to install Arch.

If you guys have more knowledge in this domain feel free to enlighten me, I appreciate your feedback.

Thanks.

Lenovo is obviously the better choice here but I felt bad that so many people criticized dell. Obviously dell laptops are on the more expensive side but it doesn't mean they suck. If you don't agree checkout the latest xps13, I think probably one of the most well built windows laptop out there right now with really good linux support. Lenovo T series and X1 Carbon are also some of my favorites though some of them are way more expensive dunno if I'll ever be able to afford that.

I've looked at Atom editor and in my opinion it's pretty good. Tons of features and it comes with a nice package manager apm which you can use similar to nodejs package manager npm and quite easy to search and install plugins that you need all from the commandline.

If you've never tried vim, going for atom would be the better choice unless you're prepared to invest tons of hours learning and extending vim. Vim although makes you really efficient at editing and certain tasks has a big learning curve. I mean you can get over the basics in less than an hour but making use of the more advanced vim functionalities takes times getting used to and requires practice.

For web development, atom has this really cool feature that shows you the live markup of your pages as you're working on it. Also it has a developer console similar to chromium which allows you to inspect and debug specific elements from the page. If I didn't have any idea about vim and wanted something that just works out of the box, I'd go for atom.