Notes on installing Crouton on a Chromebook

I opted for the Unity interface for Ubuntu. HowToGeek has a great set of instructions.

At the end of the install, you have a very basic Unity interface. Everything useful is missing. The absolute easiest way to fix this is to get the Software Center.

Open Xterm by pressing ctrl-alt-t. Now type in sudo apt-get update. Wait. The next command is sudo apt-get install software-center. Wait again. There is no icon again, so go to lens and search for it.

That is all there is to it. Get installing.

My short list of software is:
Firefox
Chromium (to match Chrome)
Stellarium (to match Chrome's Planetarium software)
Dropbox
VLC Player
Restricted Extras
Inkscape
Libre Office (Search for LibreOffice and scroll down a bit for the suite)
Document Viewer

At the end of the day, you will need to "reboot" Ubuntu to all changes to go into effect. Click the gear and click the restart option. This will eventually return you to Chrome. Go ahead and open the shell and type sudo startunity again.

Zork

A long time ago, in a computer store called CompUSA, I purchased a game called Zork.

Back in the dark ages, before the internet, it was possible to find games on store shelves for years and years. Zork is an old one, published in 1977, I didn’t obtain a copy until some time in the nineties. I bet they handed me a free floppy disc, as per the disc of the month club policy.

I bought Zork in response to seeing my friends copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. We figured we could take turns playing each other’s games. The only flaw in an otherwise perfect plan was he had DOS and I had something named after a fruit. For some reason it never occurred to me to use Disk Copy and the free disc to give my friend a copy.

Surprisingly, I still have that floppy and a computer that has a floppy drive.

How I loved that game. Pretty soon, I will walk thru the whole series again.

Cubify Boom!

I have managed to capture the error from Cubify's Invent software.

This error indicates that the video drivers are not up to date. I am really stuck with this, the computer I am working on was downgraded from Windows 7 to XP and there is no going back for a variety of issues. XP is really at the end of its life and I shouldn't be using it.

To get around this issue, I have been creating files with TinkerCad then importing them into the Cubify pre-flight software. (UPDATE - TInkerCAD has disappeared.) Both TinkerCad and the Cubify software work great together.