Thoughts about Ubuntu on my Chromebook

For my extended vacation that I just got back from, I decided to leave the MacBook Air at home and try to purchase the Acer Chromebook from the Google Play store for the price of $199. Upon receiving the first one, there was a problem with the screen backlighting not working properly, and after conversing with the Google Play customer service people, I got a replacement unit that worked just fine.

The next step was to put something else on it than the Chrome OS. Not that I am against the idea of the Chrome OS, but I knew that I was not going to be in internet service areas all of the time, which would limit the functionality of the Chromebook. So I found this posting on how to install Ubuntu on a Chromebook:

How to install Ubuntu on Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook

And I must say that it works very well, even though the stock Acer Chromebook has a slow processor, slow hard drive, and only 2 GB of RAM. I highly recommend it for someone looking for an inexpensive travel computer that you can use for web surfing, e-mail checking, light document work, watching movies, etc.

One snag I ran into was an error that came up while updating. When using the Update Manager, I would get the following error after selecting some updates to install:

Requires installation of untrusted packages

So I found a posting on the Ubuntu forums on how to fix this. Basically, I just went to the terminal and ran the following two commands:

sudo apt-get update

and:

sudo apt-get upgrade

After these were done, I was able to get through all of the updates just fine.

BTW, Happy Anniversary to Darryl Sittler, the former Toronto Maple Leafs captain, who on this day in 1976 scored an NHL record 10 points (6 goals and 4 assists) in a game vs. the Boston Bruins.

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