Yesterday, Google took the wraps off its operating system, called Chrome OS which it announced in July of this year. The unveiling was well in advance of its expected availability in late 2010, but Google says it wants to share the OS with as many developers as possible and as early as possible. The source code is already available for downloading, and if you’re technical enough (which I’m not), you can compile it on a Linux machine; but this task is not for the faint hearted although Google has posted some useful instructions on its Chromium blog.
I won’t bore you with details of what Google Chrome OS is, if you already know about it. I’ll link to three helpful articles on the internet – one from jkontherun, which talks about what Google Chrome OS is, and the major takeaways from yesterday’s event, one from the technologycafe which has a boatload of screenshots taken during yesterday’s unveiling, and finally one from gizmodo, titled, rather ambitiously, “everything you need to know about Chrome OS”.
Here’s a video from Google telling people what Chrome OS is:
If you want to try it yourself, one of the moderators of the gdgt website has compiled a very early version of the Chrome OS designed to run in a virtualised environment, in software like VMWare or VirtualBox. I’ll link you to a post where you can download the VMWare image, as well as instructions on getting it to work on VirtualBox. I tried running it on VMWare without much success, so that’s why I’m recommending VirtualBox instead, but your mileage may vary. I played with the Chrome OS on a Windows Vista Home Premium notebook with 2Gb of RAM. The virtual machine was assigned 768MB of RAM, and I used NAT networking in VirtualBox. Below are some screenshots I took, most of which should be self explanatory, I think! Do drop a comment if you have any questions.
Oh, for the life of me, I can’t get the applications panel to work. Don’t ask me why. The applications panel is where you have shortcuts to the most commonly used/accessed web applications – for example YouTube, Google Docs, Google Talk, etc. And the OS hung on me everytime once I used it for a couple of minutes. Ah, the joy of using pre-alpha software!
Great post.
And your site loads really fast, which host are you using?
[Reply]
Da Alpha Dog Reply:
November 21st, 2009 at 10:07 am
@wwa, thanks. Exabytes is the hoster, located in Malaysia, so less hops for Malaysian readers, so it should be fast.
[Reply]
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