HP Chromebook 14 and crouton

[devilock76]

So I recently purchased an HP Chromebook 14 (4gb ram version that comes with T-mobile data for life. Goal was to see if I could turn it into a mobile soft synth engine for stage usage. So here is what I went through and some results:

(instructions abound out there for most steps so I won't repeat them. Other than stuff not documented well yet. This is a quick and dirty workflow guide that is all)
1. First off to developer mode we go.
2. Download crouton
3. Setup chroot using debian wheezy and xfce as the distro and window manager (go get a snack, this will take a while)
4. once done into wheezy we go.
5. Added backports, deb-multimedia and kxstudio repos (and a few other non related repos) oh and of course an apt-get update then upgrade
6. Install preferred music apps.
7. So the touchpad didn't recognize tap to click. This is a debian thing, xorg would not obey changes so I made a quick script to fix it and launch it from the XFCE startup manager.
8. Alsa sequencer has the permissions wrong. Udev is the issue there and exporting rules to the crouton udev instance did not resolve it. Fixed these in rc.local to add /dev/snd/seq to the hwaudio group as well as give the chmod to 660 (was 600)
9. Chrome sets up the audio hardware other than /dev/snd/seq to the group hwaudio. So your user account will probably need to be in both the audio group and hwaudio. At least that is how I set mine up.
10. Enjoy.

Results:
USB-midi works, have not tried a USB audio device yet though. Sure it will be fine. Although chrome does not support it the raw data does pass down to crouton and it can support it.

Performance is great, one of my tests I had cadence running with carla hexter jack-dssi host, hexter getting fed into rakarrack before going out to system audio. Realtime stage worthy latency and barely a blip on resources as far as processor and memory. Very impressed with what this little $349 machine I got at the local Walmart (only local vendor of this model) can do. Plus it boots to chromeos in 7 seconds and has a good 8 hours of battery life.

Side note for those interested in what can be done in chrome. There is an audiotool app (feels clunky with the touchpad, recommend an external mouse for this). Also there is another caled Audio Sauna which is nice. A few random others as well. All are online apps (no offline mode as of yet). However if you are on the stable channel chrome os does not support USB-MIDI. However that support is in the dev channel right now so it is coming or you could switch to dev channel if you are feeling bold. I am happy enough though that crouton supports it.

Ken

[Shadow_7]

You can change that tap to click behavior. I used to add mousedev.tap_time=0 to disable it BITD. But the newer kernels have differing names for that stuff now. And various tpconfig and other psmouse type module stuff to configure that stuff. Probably handled in udev rules these days ala /lib/udev/*. I hate scratchpad gestures, but they're still there under the radar.

[Shadow_7]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics

Not debian but pretty thorough on mouse options in semi-current content.

[devilock76]

I got all the hardware issues sorted out with a combination of edits to rc.local and startup scripts managed by XFCE. So all is good there. Thank you though.

Ken