Google Cr-48 Ubuntu Adventures, part 2: Kubuntu Oneiric

As I alluded to in my previous post about installing vanilla Ubuntu Oneiric onto the Google Cr-48, Canonical's new Unity desktop system has annoyed me to the point of exhaustion. Rather than wear grooves into my Cr-48's trackpad for all the pointer motion required to use window menus, I've trashed and reinstalled the system from scratch with Kubuntu, the derivative distribution of Ubuntu focused on using the K Desktop Environment as the primary desktop UI system.

To be fair, I considered the up-and-comer Lubuntu, which also values the simplicity principle like Chrome OS. However, I first wanted to try something I was fairly confident would be stable on this system, and have the network management support necessary to get 3G working. I may try Lubuntu from a "live USB stick" later; if so, I'll post about that too.

KDE is an old friend. I used to work on NetBSD, another Unix-like OS, which had the usual bland X11 GUI and its applications available. When KDE 2 was available for NetBSD in 2001, and I took the time to compile it and try it out, I immediately switched to it as my desktop UI for a 486-based PC and a Commodore Amiga. While slow and memory-hungry for the time — previous X11 applications were generally written in plain C, whereas KDE heavily uses C++ — it still proved speedy in comparison to other then-available OS's (...I'm giving Redmond the evil eye here).

Prior to KDE, most X Window System UIs were based on a loose collection of applications and a window manager. What K brought to the table was integration: the desktop system included a uniform widget library, background services to streamline communication between applications, tools to manipulate system menus automatically, and graphical system management applications. It was, in my opinion, the first "grown-up" GUI for modern Unix systems, promising to bring Unix within the reach of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS users. (CDE promised similar goals, but didn't really deliver on anything besides a uniform widget toolkit.)

It had its share of problems, though. KDE is based on the Qt widget library, which originally had its own software license that made it difficult to integrate with applications written to use the GNU license; this led a few developers to start working on a competitor, GNOME. KDE also fell victim to feature bloat, a concept that applications like Google Chrome, and entire environments like GNOME and Chrome/Chromium OS, have sought to reverse by simplifying the user interface, and removing optional settings. While I may have recommended KDE to a new Unix user in the mid-2000s because of its similarity to other operating system UIs at the time, the simplicity approach has a lot of appeal today.

Fast-forward to today, and I find myself writing this post from a KDE-based system once again: Kubuntu Oneiric, which as of this writing uses KDE 4.7.1. The traditional desktop metaphor is alive and well, though it certainly has more visual effects these days. And while I find it somewhat nostalgic to go through the system settings to tweak small things to the way I like them, I have to admit that it is still a settings-heavy system, love or hate it.

But I digress; it's time to move on to the real substance of this post.

Google Cr-48: Installing Ubuntu Oneiric, and 3G support

So those of you who have followed my Chrome OS/Chromium OS adventures may be disappointed to find out that not only have I stopped producing builds, I've abandoned the Chromium OS project — at least for now. I still believe in the principles behind CrOS, but as it hasn't been working on my hardware for months, I was forced to choose another option.

Because of persistent wireless issues ever since Chrome OS 0.12 was released, which could have been fixed long ago simply by updating the compat-wireless ath9k driver, I reflashed the BIOS — taking care to save a backup copy of the original, should I want to try Chrome OS again — and installed the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot (11.10 Beta 2), completely overwriting the disk (including the partition table).

If you choose to follow in these footsteps, be aware that this completely blows away Chrome OS; it doesn't run in a dual-boot or parallel configuration. It's possible to go back, but how to do so is not covered here; you will need to reflash the BIOS to the original, then use a Chrome OS recovery disk.

I should also be very clear that Ubuntu 11.10 is a pre-release OS and is bound to have bugs. So tread at your own risk. It's due out next month (actually, in a couple weeks), but as with any newly released software, expect something to break in unexpected ways.

Finally, before describing what I did, note that this isn't for the light-hearted. If you want to try this, I hope you've done at least one install of a Unix-like OS (Linux, BSD, etc.) in the past.