Although Linux had been my daily driver for almost two decades, when I switched to Chrome OS I regarded the Crostini Chrome OS Linux container mostly as a curiosity.

Sure, I was eager to have some fun with Linux on my Chromebox. But I already lived fully in the cloud and web apps met all my computing needs. I assumed the main use cases for Crostini were advanced development or DevOps.

To check out Crostini, I installed some astronomical image visualization and processing software for Linux. Next, I used Python preinstalled on Crostini to test the code I was writing with Repl.it and make sure it ran on a different system.

When I began working on Suite8080, a suite of Intel 8080 Assembly cross-development tools in Python, I needed some CP/M emulators and 8080 tools to test the Python programs I was developing, as well as my Assembly code. Again, installing and running such Linux software on Crostini worked well.

I came to love Crostini, now a key component of my Chrome OS toolset. It lets me run all sorts of niche applications and specialized software for my hobby projects and geeky interests.

#chromeOS #Linux

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My work on Suite8080 is making me rediscover the Unix M4 macro processing language.

Suite8080, a suite of Intel 8080 Assembly cross-development tools I'm writing in Python, includes also an assembler. I designed the latter to optionally read from the standard input, a feature that gives for free macro processing via a separate tool like m4. I can feed macro Assembly source to m4 and pipe the expanded output into the assembler.

The M4 language is a good choice thanks to its power and ubiquity on POSIX systems.

However, m4 is an obscure tool with a learning curve made steep by the unintuitive quoting and expansion rules. There are few resources and no books or tutorials. The very few code samples are abstract, short, and formatted with little or no whitespace and indentation, which doesn't help readability.

After extensive online research, I put together a list of the best learning and reference resources:

• GNU M4 manual: the complete reference
• Notes on the M4 Macro Language: an overview with a practical focus
• M4 Playground: a collection of research papers and commented examples
• Stack Overflow questions tagged m4: practical applications and issues
• Working with the M4 Macro Language: a list of resources by James Howard
• M4 tutorial of the COHERENT Unix clone
• m4 support in Opbasm: the macro package of the Opbasm assembler for PicoBlaze microcontrollers (m4 source)

#Linux #development

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