PYTHON on a Chromebook

Spoiler: Thonny works.

In my previous post, I touched the topic of running Linux and BASIC on a Chromebook. The question was, does Thonny (Python 3) run too? Yes, it does.

Installing Thonny by
sudo apt install thonny
draws in a lot of stuff and takes a while. However, in the end you will get a working Thonny with a Python3 interpreter. I have not checked out any of the advanced things, such as matplotlib or NumPy. Presently I do feel confident that those will work just fine.

BASIC on a Chromebook

This continues my series into the past of many of us. Many of us learned programming by using the BASIC language. I school, I was forced to learn PASCAL, which was not of much use, other than understanding programming principles, which I already knew from BASIC. Learning F0RTRAN was the real step into the world of computing.

Anyway, this post is about BASIC on Chromebooks. I do own several of those. Not everyone of those is able to run Linux easily (there is always a way to force the hardware, one way or the other). This post is concerned with Chromebooks which can be easily set to run Linux applications.

To set any such Chromebook to do that, access "Settings" => "About ChromeOS" => "Linux Development Environment". If your Chromebook has that, install the Linux-thing. This might take a while.

Once your Chromebook has the virtual machine with (Debian) linux on board, you might start a (Linux) terminal and install "BWBASIC" by typing
sudo apt install bwbasic
in the terminal.

For the fun of it, I did install geany the same way. Now you can run your BASIC programs on a Chromebook in style. 
I have not yet checked the use of the FreeBasic Compiler. I see no reason why this should not work.

Can I run Python/Thonny on my ChromeBook? Stay tuned!

Connecting JBL Flip 4 Speaker to a Chromebook

If you follow my other blog, you might know that I lately obtained a pair of JBL Flip 4 speakers. There were a few drivers behind that decision, first of all the sublime sound quality and secondly that a pair can form a stereo pair. While that was all find with my phone, my Chromebooks, while connecting, had troubles accepting the devices as audio sinks.

For convenience, I gave those things names, as this is possible in the JBL Connect App on Android. Maybe that was the cause of all troubles, I don't know.
The speakers, while working fine, refused to present the settings option on the JBL Connect App at some stage. Also, it turned out to be a hit and miss game when connecting the speakers up into a stereo pair.

So, I decided to reset the speakers to factory setting. This is done by pressing the "+" and "play" bottom, while the speaker is powered on, until the speaker powers off.
Of course, this removed my fancy naming scheme. Well, so be it!

As a result, the speakers are now recognized by my Chromebooks.
So, If you have trouble connecting your JBL speaker to a Chromebook, you might want to try to reset your speaker to factory settings.

As a side remark, you will still need your phone to setup stereo mode. Once that is done, you can connect with the Chromebook and enjoy a clean and neat stereo stage setup by really small Bluetooth speakers.