How to install full Chrome OS in Ubuntu.

Yes you read it right.

Chrome OS is built mainly for Chromebooks and is supposed to be a cloud based OS. It revolves around chrome and almost everything is done via chrome apps.

It may not seem to be a great concept in the first encounter, but considering the time people spent on their browser and the power of cloud now, Chrome OS can be sufficient for the general public.

The best part is that Chromebooks are very very cheap. Starting from $100 (approx 6000 INR), they are the bear minimum machines. They are extremely light weight and have quite long battery life.

Coming back to installing it in Ubuntu, just run these commands :

wget https://dl.dropbox.com/u/302704/chromiumos/lightdm-login-chromiumos_1.1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i lightdm-login-chromiumos_1.1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

And that's it. You can run the ChromeOS either in a window using "chromeos" command or as a seperate Desktop Environment by choosing it at login. Do ask if you get any error. I had to work around one too.

All the credits go to Janez Troha. Have fun with ChromeOS!

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Vimium and VimFx : Use your browser without mouse or touchpad

If you're like me, you hate taking your fingers off the keyboard and use the mouse or touchpad. Be relieved, 'coz I've got just the right thing for you.

Before I start let me introduce you to Vim. Vim is a terminal-based text editor on *nix which uses just key combinations for everything you need to do. Find out more and get the windows version at Vim's site.

Vim has inspired several browser extensions that let you do everything on your browser just by pressing the right keys. Chrome and Chromium have Vimium, while Firefox has VimFx, along with several others like Vimperator and Vimium for Firefox.

I'll be covering Vimium for Chromium, which is quite cool and the developer describes it as the "The Hacker's Browser".

First things first, here is an overview of the shortcuts, which can be accessed by pressing Shift+? .

Those who have used Vim before, just go on treating the webpage as if it was a text file in Vim and you won't be disappointed.

For others, this is to get you going :

j : Up
k : Down
h : Left
l : Right

For opening a link in the same tab, just press f and the links on the whole page get highlighted.

Now you can press the keys for the link you desire to open. See, no mouse required ever.

To do this for opeing a link in a new tab, just use capital F or capital keys for the link.

There are may more key bindings in Vimium which make your life easier.

But everything has its cons, and so does this.

• Vimium doesn't work for websites having there own shortcuts, like GMail. Well this is good infact as GMail has very nice shortcuts by itself.
• Vimium is always running, which may slow down your browser. Not much though.
• Unintentional commands. It always listens, even if you don't want it too.

But the advantages are surely more than the disadvantages.

Do try "The Hackers' Browser" and tell us what you think. Thanks for reading !!

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Design your Gnome 3 UI Your Way

Recently i installed gnome 3 into my system which is running Ubuntu. In the past i used gnome 2 and unity but never got a chance to try gnome 3. Finally after the installation when i got my hands on it, the only thing that came into my mind was "WOW! Now that's called Beauty at it's best".

Soon after I started using it, I found a bug. The text in the menus was incomplete. It was cut half vertically. I asked my friend, Anshul if he knows anything about it but fate had something more kept for us. So we started searching for it's fix all over the internet. While searching for the fix i found that gnome 3 is having it's UI designed in CSS and i was like "What ! Am I Drunk ?". As soon as we read this, we understood that all we have to do is change the CSS to fix this issue and that's what happened. We finally fixed it. Later i thought that this is something i should share with my blog readers. I should tell the people about the power of Gnome 3.

All you have to do is:

• Open terminal and type

sudo gedit /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

•  Make the changes in the opened CSS file and save it. (Please be careful to not make wrong changes else the UI may stop working. It is always advisable to make a backup of the CSS file before making any changes)
• Now press Alt-F2 and type rt (This will reload the theme and not the entire gnome-shell. If you are a developer and you often make changes then this will help you a lot in testing things)
• Voilla! Now you can see the effect of all the changes you made. 

Design it but be careful because "With great power comes great responsibility". Don't forget to share your views with us.

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