Arch Linux

sbfreak

Member

Registered: 2010-06-06

Posts: 149

Achieving the chromebook feel on Arch

Hello Arch community.
I've been thinking about this since the last week and I think I'm going to try temporally migrate to a chrome os like system.I say this because the last 5 chrome vanilla daily releases done by hexxeh won't boot on either machines I own and buying a chromebook just for the sake of testing the feel is out of the question.

This is madness,why not just use chromium (browser) along with your favorit DE ? It's practically the same thing.

I don't really know how to put this but somehow it won't feel right.I have the ability to immediately install an advanced utility like pidgin yet I'm searching chrome web store for some random messaging app.Same goes for other apps.I want a full screen browser and just the browser.

Ideas and help greatly appreciated.

graph

Member

Registered: 2010-12-21

Posts: 105

Re: Achieving the chromebook feel on Arch

Not sure I'm understanding. So you insist on using Arch, and not something like JoliCloud? Because I honestly think, that Jolicloud is (the closest thing to) what you're looking for.

And you don't want to just use a DE like Fluxbox, disable wm-decorations and run Chromium in fullscreen?

sbfreak

Member

Registered: 2010-06-06

Posts: 149

Re: Achieving the chromebook feel on Arch

I've tried jolicloud in the past.I don't really like it.
Thanks for the suggestion.Never tried fluxbox.It seems I can autostart chromium without window decorations at startup.That's just what I need.
http://old.fluxbox.org/docs/en/faq-dev.php#decor

Last edited by sbfreak (2011-07-25 18:27:37)

graph

Member

Registered: 2010-12-21

Posts: 105

Re: Achieving the chromebook feel on Arch

Yep, that's possible with fluxbox.
And fluxbox is quite fast to boot too. If you want to further improve the boot-time (Which you probably will, since you want to go as fast as possible to chromium), I would recommend this ArchWiki-page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Speed-up_Boot

sbfreak

Member

Registered: 2010-06-06

Posts: 149

Re: Achieving the chromebook feel on Arch

Ok installed xorg fluxbox ttf-liberation ttf-dejavu nvidia and chromium-browser-bin.
My ~/.xinitrc has "exec startfluxbox" and my ~/.fluxbox/apps has

[app] (chromium)
[Deco] {NONE}
[end]

[startup] {chromium}

Shouldn't that give a fullscreen chromium once I startx ?

archman-cro

Member

From: Croatia

Registered: 2010-04-04

Posts: 943

Website

Re: Achieving the chromebook feel on Arch

And you don't want to just use a DE like Fluxbox, disable wm-decorations and run Chromium in fullscreen?

Bear in mind that Fluxbox is only a window manager, while a desktop environment is a set of programs ready for the user to use. Thus, fluxbox has only a few dependencies (mainly X stuff) compared to some full blown DE, which can have 100 deps.