I’m a Chrome team member and saw this going around Twitter.

Just wanted to say, you can right-click on the Cr-48 by tapping with two fingers (or holding Alt and single clicking).

You can also flip the developer mode switch under the device and get full access to a shell: http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device

hope this resolves some of the comments!

(No, I'm afraid I don't know when or if you're going to get one.)

Linked from that page is a list of hardware known to be compatible with Chrome OS: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/getting-dev-hardware/dev...

Have fun!

Somewhat unrelated:

Right now my ideal laptop would be: Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G.

I couldn't agree more, that really would be a perfect laptop.

Oh yeah, 1920x1080 on a 13". :-)

Oh stop being humble. :P I don't think it's surprising in the least that the creator of JQuery was able to snag a Cr-48. ;)

You just run a tiny daemon and then connect to it such as https://192.168.1.1:4200

http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/

Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac.

Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others]

Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.

Thanks for the write-up! I found it useful :)

edit: a thought: mind trying `compgen -abc` at the terminal? Idea came from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/948008/linux-command-to-l...

That being said: when I was playing with dev builds on my netbook last year, the first thing I did was put my private key on it.

Though you could refer to SSH keys which are on a USB drive, fully protecting your info if your laptop is lost (as long as your drive wasn't plugged in)...

Though I think you're misunderstanding this machine as both a developer machine and something more than just a browser. Chrome is really the only app. That I can get to a terminal at all is a huge surprise to me, I don't believe this is supposed to compete with normal laptops as dev machines. I didn't expect this to have ssh installed at all.

As a matter of fact I can't figure out how to (or if I can) copy/paste in the shell, I scp'd that somewhere else so I could post it.

Thanks much for the (sc)paste!

edit: wow, there's not much there, is there? The only text editor I see is qemacs, which I've never touched: http://man.cx/qemacs and no clue on copy / paste.

    I wanted to quickly crunch some numbers and went looking 
    for a calculator. Surprisingly there wasn’t one in the 
    store. I ended up having to use the JavaScript console to 
    do the calculations – which, I suspect, is not what 
    Google expects most users to do.

There has to be a reason Google is bundling Flash on this thing, and I bet the reason is not that Google thinks Flash is so awesome. That has to be the first part of a trade with Adobe.

I guess we'll find out how photoshop.com with NaCL plugins works out. :)

Webcams and microphones can be accessed via the HTML5 <device> API, cross-domain requests can be done with HTTP Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which is arguably much nicer than Flash's cross-origin policy XML file solution, and multithreading can be done with web workers.

http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

I would think that someone as high profile as John Resig could get one pretty easily. (actually he did! I mean without filling out the same form as "normal" people) Maybe it shows that he's too humble to ask for one directly...

I can't help thinking thats beside the point and exactly what google are not designing this for.

Any other ideas what development should look like in the idea cloud-based world?

I just replaced the HD on my 13" Macbook with an SSD, but I haven't seen anything about replacing the DVD with a battery. I do have an external laptop battery with a home made magsafe connector and a portable 4G hotspot. I suspect that this setup is only going to last about a year or so longer, though.

The ability to run a terminal and local PHP or Django are also biggies, but other than that I don't need much of an OS. Everything else I use on a day to day basis is cloud based anyhow

Eagerly awaiting the day I can break free of the desktop os for good

Too bad about the terminal and *nix tools. I guess I'll have to use something like Cloud9 IDE to code. I'm really looking forward to the free 3g, though. That and the old black macbook feel.