It’s “Talk About Tuesday” around the blogosphere and I’m going to lay off the sewing this week and go tech.

You people seem to like it when I show off my hot Geek Gurl status and I had a little set-back with the latest sewing project. Namely you scrawny and curveless people on the net. I hope you get hips the size of New Hampshire when baby-making like me!

I’m sure you remember my entry: The Making of a Chromebook. If not, go check it out. (It was one of my top hits last year.)

Seems people want to know how to make their own Chromebook and with a cost of $300-500 USD, I can’t blame you. That’s a nasty hit in the gut for what is little more than a giant web browser.

The back story sum up: My friend’s son had a netbook. Sisters, being sisters, dropped it. Out a window. Ouch. Hello dead hard drive.  I installed the Chrome OS onto a 4GB SD card and gave it back.

The benefits to Chrome OS that I saw primarily lay with the power of “in the cloud computing” and the age of this child. A middle-grade child doesn’t need a whole lot of specialty software.

The downside – no Skype app for Chrome. This kid likes to Skype. Can’t say as I blame him. Vid-calling is the way to go for all those loved ones not local. It’s the way I talked with family when I moved out west in ’97. I’m really glad vid-chatting is far easier now.  (Can I get a holla for those that used Eyeball Chat? Oh yeah!)

Finding out they could get the hard drive replaced under warranty, the family went that route. The problem? This is a netbook so they had no OS to put back onto it. Brilliant. They couldn’t get a Windows replacement under warranty. I hate Windows so very much.

I ended up with the netbook once more. This time with a nice hard drive to load Linux on, with the express request to find something Skype friendly.

I spent WEEKS trying to get straight up Ubuntu for netbooks to work. Forget it. I installed so many different patches and tinkered with microphone settings until my eyes crossed. I simply could not get it to accept the onboard microphone.  I finally went with Linux Mint with Unity.

Here goes:

Start with one slightly abused but well-loved netbook:

Yes, that’s the same picture from the previous post. I wasn’t taking another one.

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