In my spare time, I’ve been working on Go-SDL2 and Camlistore. I’m usually not sitting in front of my home desktop, so I want to be able to code anywhere. My battle-worn MacBook Pro could do the job, but it’s heavy, bulky, and aging.

To fix this, I bought the HP Chromebook 11. The display is nice, the price is great, and the keyboard is comfortable. It accepts a microUSB charge, so I don’t even have to worry about packing an extra charger. The bummer is development: good luck trying to run anything besides JSFiddle.

For a while, I was using SSH into my desktop to code. Most of the time this works. The problem was me: some days I would forget to turn on my desktop, other days I left it in Windows, and every day I gritted my teeth if I was coding graphics. I fantasized about a machine that booted quickly and had all the programs I needed.

Turns out, the answer was right in front of me: the Chromebook.

Recipe for Success!

• Buy the Chromebook
• Enable developer mode
• Install Secure Shell and set up with Crosh
• Harden your install
• Download and run Crouton
• Install X11 and xmonad
• Profit!

Total Cost: $279 + half a day’s worth of work.

Over the next few days, I’ll go into more detail on these steps.