So, Google recently started advertising for people who want a test-run ChromeOS laptop on their new-tab page in Chrome. I filled out the form, and one arrived on my front porch yesterday!

It's actually a pretty beautiful little laptop; I wish Dell built their laptops so well, and with such nice design. It's too bad the touchpad is horrendous. One plus: 2 years of 100MB/month Verizon 3G service. Paltry, I know, but great in a pinch when WiFi isn't around.

I got it repartitioned and Ubuntu double-booting with ChromeOS pretty easily, which actually makes this a pretty decent general-purpose laptop now.

Anyone else here get one?

Only US residents are eligible, otherwise one would be sitting on my desk.

Which version of Ubuntu did you install?

Tell me more about the touchpad. What hardware does it use?

What CPU is on it?

I'm pretty sure the touchpad is a Synaptic, but the drivers must suck. For one thing, multitouch scrolling pretty much works, but only vertically (not horizontally). The real problem is that it's one of the new-style "click the whole touchpad" type setups, but the touchpad is hinged at the top. So the closer you are to the top of the touchpad (closer to the keyboard), the harder it is to click. And obviously clicking and dragging things is very difficult, which is a stupid thing to make difficult. It also means that you have to press hard enough just to click that by the time you've clicked, you've inadvertently moved your mouse cursor a half-inch, making just clicking on stuff a crap shoot. It never should have made it out of QA.

I put on Ubuntu 10.10, which seems to run reasonably well, except that its touchpad support is even worse than ChromeOS.

It runs on an Atom, though this is just a prototype device. Honestly, though, it's not as bad as I'd expected, given what I've read about Atom processors. It does have problems running full-screen Flash videos smoothly, but otherwise it's actually quite powerful enough for its purpose. And battery life is quite good-I'll get about 8 hours of actually active use out of a single charge.

I signed up for both business accounts and personal... Hopefully I get one soon!

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I'm pretty sure the touchpad is a Synaptic, but the drivers must suck.

Yes.

Quote: I put on Ubuntu 10.10, which seems to run reasonably well, except that its touchpad support is even worse than ChromeOS.

Add ppa:utouch-team/utouch to your software sources and install the synaptics-dkms package. See the package page and this bug.

Application filed. We'll see if The Generous Google Gods want to make me happy this year [grin]

Quote: Original post by Bregma
Only US residents are eligible, otherwise one would be sitting on my desk.

It let me put in my country and postal code properly but only had US states listed.

I guess we'll see what happens; it certainly didn't give me an error screen telling me that I was an awful human being.