Christian’s Blog

There was quite a buzz last week from Google, they released the source code for their foray into the Operating System market: Chrome OS. As readers may know, I have a Dell Mini 9. I have installed Windows 7 and Moblin and Ubuntu. All are easy to install and take up various amounts of hard disk space with Win7 taking up 90% of the 6Gb SSD. So when I heard Google was going to come out with an OS that is designed specifically for netbooks I was interested. Google makes some very nice software. I think that they collect way to much user data, however, they are a marketing company.

So when Google released their “pre” beta, I jumped at the chance. gdgt, a burgeoning gadget site with no discernable revenue model, put a compiled version of the source code up for download. I downloaded here. To use this “pre” beta you have to run it in a virtual machine. I tried to get it working in VMWare and failed, so I used Virtual Box. Virtual box is easier to download and dead easy to set up.

I set this up on my Gateway NV-52. AMD Proc, 4Gb RAM ATi Radeon3200 HD. Here is how you do it

Download Chrome from gdgt here, extract to an easy to access folder. You are going to have to point to this later. Then download and install Virtual box Virtual Box. Open the app and select ‘new’

Don’t read the message, just click ‘next’. You will then be asked to name your OS and identify what kind of OS. I chose the innovative ‘ChromeOS’. For type I select “Linux” and “Other Linux” for Version

Then click ‘next’. the next screen will ask you to select a memory size. I chose the completely arbitrary amount of 512 MB.

Click ‘next’. Here is an important part. for hard disk, select ‘use existing hard disk’ Browse to where you expanded your Chrome OS download.

Click ‘next’. You are pretty much done. If you have the ability to follow directions, you should see a screen eerily similar to the one below.

Click ‘finish’. You should see this screen. the next part is very important if you want to browse the internets from Chrome OS! Click the ‘Settings’ icon and then select ‘Network’. For Adapter 1, change the ‘Attached to’ selection to ‘Bridged Adapter’ then in ‘Name’ select the adapter you computer is connecting with.

click ok. You are ready to run Chrome! Click the Green ‘Start’ icon and get ready for the most underwhelming OS beta you have ever used!

So here is Chrome running in my Win7 environment using virtual box. What you see below is the start panel – its the only new screen you will see in the OS.

I was amazingly underwhelmed by ChromeOS. Specifically, all this it represents is an OS that boots to a dedicated browser. wow. Further, you can access dedicated Google Applications. wow. Other applications are bookmarks to an URL. so the calculator is an internet based app. I admit that I think this is precisely where the OS is headed. There is simply no reason to have installed application for a home based personal PC (productivity PCs are a different story).

Regardless, there is really nothing to see, do or test in the ChomeOS beta. its basically Chrome browser booting from firmware. This begs the question … what is GOOG going to do with this … thing? Its just a Linux build? Will it get Ubuntu or Win7 off netbooks? Will developers go for it because its cheap? Who knows, apart from brand loyalty and Win hatred, there has to be some compelling reason to use this. Will GOOG make it somehow easier to access your google data? GOOG has some amazing developers so only time will tell