Programming on Samsung Chromebook

Programming on samsung chromebook

Just enable Developer Mode, and you will get the access to the shell.

Can I develop with VS Code on the new Samsung Chromebook Pro?

My team and I have been experimenting heavily with the Samsung Chromebook Pro and have been actively switching our development environments completely over to the Chromebook ecosystem (away from Mac). Personally I run a combination of Atom and NeoVim with a complete development environment for Node.js, Postgres, and Redis on my Chromebook Pro.

For any desktop IDE you'll need to run Crouton which means you'll have to put your Chromebook into developer mode which is less secure. If you don't want to do that your only options are either use something like Caret (which will only do basic text editing) or to use some sort of cloud-based IDE; ones I know of: Cloud9, Codenvy, Shiftedit, and Eclipse Che (an open source one that just recently caught my eye).

The good news is Crouton can run effectively anything that Linux can (especially since the Pro has an x86 processor), and from what I can tell VSCode supports Ubuntu, the default Linux distribution for Crouton. You can even set up the Crouton Extension to put your GUI programs into Chrome tabs or windows within ChromeOS using Xiwi.

Anything with a GUI running in Crouton is going to hurt performance and battery life on Chromebook since ChromeOS is finely tuned for running specifically the Chrome Browser. I don't expect you run out and learn a terminal-based editor today if you haven't already, but I highly recommend at least getting comfortable using the terminal for quick editing, using git, and running simple shell commands. That will save you that sweet Chromebook battery life and a bit of frustration dealing with a somewhat-quirky Xiwi and Crouton Extension.

If you're willing to work out a few kinks the Chromebook Pro development experience is pretty great. It's truly a quality piece of hardware and ChromeOS is fantastic with the addition of the ability to run Android apps.

UPDATE (9/19/17):

There is another option now for at least getting server environments running on ChromeOS without using developer mode. It's called Termux, an Android app, which can bind to a local port and can be interfaced with via SSH. You can read more on the blog post we came across here: https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-development-chromebook/ You will, however, have to use a terminal-based text editor like VIM or a native ChromeOS one like Caret, so it will not run GUI editors like VSCode or Atom.

Microcontroller development on ARM Chromebook

Your choice of development platform is going to be heavily restricted by the tools available. For the more niche uControllers, you might find there is little choice. One thing is for sure, none of the tool vendors are going to be remotely interested in supported Chromebooks as a distinct platform as it's a minuscule proportion of an already small market. Likewise, web-service based tools are also highly niche, and I'm hard pressed to understand why anybody would want them.

Your best bet is to install Linux - provided the development tools you want to use run under it. GCC certainly can, but for proprietary tools it's likely to have to be some flavour of Windows - and most likely XP.

The lack of serial port is easily overcome with a USB-Serial dongle. Avoid dongles built on the PL2303 chipset where the unholy trinity of buggy drivers, silicon and possibly even devices is common. Devices built on the FTDI chipset seem much more reliable, but are more expensive. Using TRRS as a serial port sound like a nightmare: remember the console interface is the way you're going to debug your system - you need to trust that it works reliably.

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