Once you have your C7 Chrubuntubook fired up and tuned to your desires, you may notice that "official" repos for 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 (think Canonical and whatever was there by default) lack lots of essential software. It kinda renders this Chrubuntu almost as app-less as the Chrubuntu for ARM Chromebook. Say, you want an "official" Ubuntu x86 Skype? There's nothing like this in repos by default.
Furtermore, you may want to install XBMC, this king of streamers. OK, there's an entry in Ubuntu "Software Center", go ahead. I did, and for my Chrubuntu 12.04 XBMC app has a 1.5 year old version 11. I used for about a week, only to notice that it may randomly freeze my C7 on "live" (TV) streams.
Nothing of this sort was ever happened on my Nook Color running XBMC 12.0 "Frodo" Beta for Android. So I went for a recently released stable "Frodo" for Ubuntu. All it takes is adding a repo for it:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc
That's it. If you like me start from version 11 already installed, it will nicely update it, leaving your collection of precious video add-ons intact. Hello, Superbowl on Chrubuntu!
OK, you don't want XBMC, you want Skype. It's almost the same story, so you do this:
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ $(lsb_release -sc) partner"
Then the same stanza brings you the desired result:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install skype
I didn't do it yet: was too busy in preparing a repair of my dead Blackberry Curve 9300. But I will do Skype one of those days. Even if it takes some tweaking to make a mic work. Or downgrading Skype to the version that really works on Chrubuntu. Mind you: Chrubuntu is still quite limited in what it can do (and run) because of using Google "experimental" kernel and throwing an "IOMEM error" on every reboot. So far, nobody was able to nag the bug.
So called "Chrubuntu 12.10" seems to never tackle these problems. It just added more of their own.
Of course, all the above is nothing compared to the limitations that Samsung ARM Chrubuntu users suffer. However, as long as there is a version of XBMC "Frodo" for ARM/Android 2.3+, they might try it, why not? My Nook Color streams stuff like there's no tomorrow.
Hey, so you're like the only guy I know that's put the time & effort into researching the internals of the Acer C7. I'm getting the sdhci-pci error, but I'm not sure if it's because my SD card is either bad or one of those black market chinese ones programmed to look like 32 w/ only like 2GB in reality, or if it's a driver compatibility issue. I know the controller is the same one that does the ethernet & I know this thing handles a 2GB I have lying around just fine, but I've noticed that quite a few people have pointed out this error on this machine. Should someone file a bug report to the chromium project or are we just fucked?
ReplyDeleteChances are, your SD card is just fine. It's Acer's hardware problem. As far as I know, nobody resolved it. Chromium project has nothing to do with it, that's for sure. Chrubuntu kernel by Google used initially may also be a problem. Nobody have seen or tweaked C7 BIOS where the error could be circumvented.
ReplyDeleteI heard Acer did something for the next batch of C7's, I just can't check.