Software Engineering Blogger

Back in 90s when I worked at IBM, I used to use dumb terminals connected to Unix servers that had some amazing specifications. Then we went into the direction of having powerful desktop computers and powerful laptops. With the introduction of Chromebooks (with ChromeOS), we are back to those dumb terminal days but still at the infancy phase. With Chromebooks, you can be almost 100% productive if you are not in IT industry, but when it comes to IT professionals, we are slowly getting there. More and more tools are becoming available online through web browsers. One of those tools is Cloud 9 IDE that I have used for software development. I can do Linux commands/scripts, Node.js, Javascript, HTML5, and Python programming all through my browser on my Chromebook. Yes, I have my IDEs for my Windows and Macbook machines, but there is something fun about developing in a cloud IDE. Maybe it is just the nerd side of me. The message in the above image is what I saw one day when my Cloud ...

I had a cheap version of an Acer 11" Windows 7 laptop that was not performing well after a few years. The machine was practically not usable so I decided to research and install the open-source Chromium OS that would make this old laptop a relatively fast “Chromebook”. Before I get into the instructions, let me share the final results. The Chromium OS boots up in 10sec on this “Chromebook”.  Browsing internet is super fast and YouTube works great,  but there are a few things that you have to watch out for if you are already used to using regular Chromebooks and you are doing a direct comparison: Chrome Web Store: This will not work as Chromium OS is not compatible with Chrome OS Web Store. You will not have access to Google Drive through the Chromium File Explorer the way you can do it in Chrome OS. This may not be important to you because you can still access Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive through your browser which is how I typically access it anyways. Chromium brows...