Setting up a Go Development Environment on a Samsung Chromebook

Since I've become an owner of a Samsung Chromebook, setting up a comfortable offline dev environment has been an ongoing goal.

I've been tinkering with various configurations for a while and have come up with this as as a starter for getting a Go Development environment up and running.

Part 1 - Installing the Go compiler

From start to finish this step should take about 40 minutes.

1. Boot the Samsung Chromebook into Developer Mode

The quick way to do this is to hold down escape + refresh + the power button.

Then press Control + D at the next page and over the course of the next 10-15 minutes the chromebook will wipe itself and install a developer mode enabled version. This brings a few things to the table like a command line shell.


2. Install Ubuntu with the help of Crouton 

I've tried dual booting Ubuntu on my Samsung Chromebook with ChrUbuntu which is fairly awesome but I had serious issues with the track pad, sound and general performance. I'm sure these issues will be ironed out over time and that being said - the wireless connectivity was much better on the Ubuntu boot than in Chrome Os - I didn't have to do the turn it off and on again song and dance with my router to get the Chromebook to connect which I frequently have to do with the Chrome Os boot.

Then I discovered Crouton and quickly I came to the conclusion that it is amazing. Ubuntu runs really smooth, the hardware works as per my Chromebook and whats more - I can switch between my linux distro and Chrome os at the touch of a button. Well four buttons (ctrl + alt + shift + Forward\Backward), but you get my point.

Installing Crouton is a piece of cake:

(i) Download the latest release from here: http://goo.gl/fd3zc
(ii) Open a shell (ctrl + alt + t) then type "shell" at the command prompt
(iii) type: sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t unity

I've chosen unity over xfce which is used on the Crouton github page, no real reason here other than I preferred the look and feel.

Once it's finished installing it can be fired up with:

sudo enter-chroot startunity


3. Go

Go Lang is also very easy to install with apt-get and works beautifully:

sudo apt-get install golang


now check that Go is installed by typing: go version

Great, the Go compiler is in place.

Part 2 - Installing LiteIDE

This step takes about 20 minutes to complete.

Now compiling from the command line is one thing but I'm from the camp of developers that likes thumping out code in an IDE.

There are a couple of IDEs for Go that could be used - for example Eclipse + goclipse.

However I've chosen to go with LiteIDE for the time being as I like its simplicity.

There are a number of tools that need installing first that are missing from the crouton unity install:

1. make

sudo apt-get install make

2. g++

sudo apt-get install build-essential g++

3. GDB

sudo apt-get install gdb

4. QT4

sudo apt-get install libqt4-*

5. Git

sudo apt-get install git

6. LiteIDE

The only difference I had here from the instructions on the LiteIDE project page was with the QTDIR path which differs from the default path used by apt-get.

One further tip here - don't use sudo for the next few lines or you'll end up making work for yourself.

The build takes about 10 - 15 minutes. Once finished, we have a working LiteIDE in \litelide\bin

Opening the liteide application and confirming that traditional "hello world" code compiles and runs:

Excellent!

Samsung Chromebook

I unboxed a Samsung Chromebook this weekend and was looking forward to giving it a whirl but was  immediately deflated when it would not connect to my BT Home Hub. All manner of configuration changes later and I was still non the wiser.

The good news is that there is an active support forum and quick replies from the chrome ninjas. I was advised to enable the "Experimental Static IP Configuration" via the chrome://flags  configuration page. One reboot later and what do you know? I was connected.

So now 48 hours later I'm very pleased as a lot of boxes have been ticked:

• It's fast. Really fast. Not just in terms of the boot up but the browsing is a lot more responsive than I am accustomed to.
• The hardware is really nice. it's compact and light. The keyboard has a great feel to it and is great for touch typing.
• The heat dissipation is excellent - this is certainly no leg warmer like the MacBook Pro
• There are plenty of excellent apps on the chrome store to suit my requirements - and many offline compatible ones too.
• The battery life is very good indeed - I've been using it for two hours and it's reporting over six hours left.
• I can remote desktop onto my Desktop  and Mac.

Will it replace the MacBook Pro?

Maybe but I have a few issues to tackle first.

I'm missing a good text editor and the ability to develop .Net code. OK Google provide a Chrome Remote Desktop application that I can use to remote onto my Windows 8 desktop PC - it's very good but not quite as responsive as the Microsoft RDP client on the Mac. It may be the case that I dual boot the machine with Ubuntu and Mono to tick this box.

I've also recently taken an interest in programming in Python. I've discovered a decent alternative for the Chromebook is to "spin up" an Amazon EC2 micro instance and SSH onto it via the built in Chrosh (CTRL + ALT + T) terminal.

I'll probably blog about programming on the Chromebook once I've researched the options properly.

Oh yes, I'm going to have to find a different game to play too...