Google Chrome OS – First Looks
I might be living in some geek-laden alternate world for saying this, but the moment Google announced that they are going to release the Google Chrome OS, we’re hearing loads of feedbacks from everyone. Some was laughing at the fact that a big company like Google wants to base their Operating System on a mere browser, some laughs at the headache Google is going to face when dealing with hardware drivers. Mac boys will just say that it won’t be as pretty as the OSX, while Linux users are divided – some are very interested to see how Google plan to deal with this, while others sworn by their own blood that Linux reigns supreme. Heck, even Eric Schmidt resigns from being one of the Apple Inc’s board of directors, since Google now is starting to step more into Apple’s core business and potentially causes major conflict of interest.
What makes me want to try Google Chrome OS
So to cut the crap out of this, I stumbled upon a retweet that mentioned hexxeh just released an early compile of Google Chrome OS that you can install into a USB disk and make it run. I wasn’t very interested at this point, as my years of experience with preliminary releases are either strange, weird and just plain ugly (it’s like you have to date the girl that your mother picks for you, you know? It can be magical, but realistically it won’t).
What got me interested is that someone mentioned that “it’s blazing fast, even from USB pendrive”. I quickly visit hexxeh’s ChromiumOS website and five seconds later I had his release on my uTorrent. He’s even nice enough to put up the Windows Imager tool so some adventurous but not technically-sound person can also try his builds. The download is pretty slim – 307 megabytes compressed (turns out to be about 2.78 gigabytes uncompressed, so you better have a decent USB disk for it).
Preparation
Loading the Google Chrome OS (Chromium) image into the USB disk is pretty simple:
Once that is done, just reboot your computer and make it boot with the USB disk (you might want to read your user’s manual on how to do this. Typically, switching the boot device is as simple as pressing Esc, F2 or F9 while the computer is starting up).
Holy Cow!
I’m astounded at the speed Chromium starts. Usually by 7-8 seconds, my Windows 7 boot logo will start to fade in and then the lengthy boot process starts. However, with Chromium, this is the exact amount of time for it to briefly flash the boot screen, and 1-2 seconds later, it shows the login prompt:
Chromium Boot Screen
And here we have the login screen
My Wi-fi card is not supported!
So the first blow for me is that my wi-fi card doesn’t seems to work with Chromium yet. I tried enabling Wi-fi from the OS (there’s a little system menu on far right corner) but it just doesn’t fire. The thing about Chromium is it depends on the cloud for all the basic operation. So without an Internet connection, not even the application menu can be loaded:
Oh noes!
So I dragged myself to my home router and connect the notebook via Ethernet, while crossing my fingers that it better works this time. Saw the card blinks a few times, saw my router blinks a few times. Once they stopped, I hit reload, and voila! The Chromium application menu:
This is where you start launching all your webapps
Chromium Applications
In this particular build, Chromium offers mostly Google webapps, i.e. GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, Picasaweb, Google Contacts and Google Books. There’s also other applications like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, YouTube, Hulu, Lala, Pandora, Facebook and Twitter. There are a few accessories included as well – calculator, to-do list and Contacts.
Now here’s the thing, all of these are web-based (even the calculator):
The web-based calculator
Launching the “Contacts” application will open a small window and sign you into Google Talk, with options to show your other Google Contacts:
I logged into my GMail account and tried to open a PDF file to see what will happen, and true enough, Chromium opens it in Google Docs, with the PDF viewer in action:
The “Chess” game actually loads a flash-based chess. It’s quite pretty really:
You can also change the appearance of the entire OS by installing Google Chrome Themes (currently you can also do this with Google Chrome browser):
Oh yeah, on the screenshot above, there’s a small notice at the bottom where they’re telling you that you can further extend Chromium by installing extensions. Unfortunately the download isn’t open to public yet, as it is a developer preview mode at the moment:
Can’t wait to see what the developers will produce for Chromium!
An attempt to be adventurous
So in an attempt to try something else, I visited Firefox download page to see what happens. Mozilla.com identifies Chromium as Linux i686 and offers the Linux version of Firefox for download:
I downloaded the file to see if I can do anything with it. Once the download is complete, I tried to open the file and this happens:
Chromium actually launches a linux terminal with the file in it! Nothing much can be done here, the moment I exit the file listing, Chromium slides the terminal out of view and bring me back to the browser.
Verdict
At the moment, it’s hard to tell if Chromium will be something of a use yet. It is still in preliminary development state and right now it’s strictly for web browsing purpose.
What I love most about Chromium is that it is extremely light, and works very fast. I would carry my USB pendrive that is loaded with Chromium anywhere I go so I can quickly boot into my account without worrying about security of my information in case I’m using someone else’s computer.
Chromium will prove to be handy too, if you’re trying to rescue a dead pc and quickly need to access the internet.
I might like Chromium, but at the moment, there’s nothing much you can do with it.
I can’t get it to work. After I finished downloading, it turns out to be chromiumos.tar.gz instead of chromiumos.img. I even tried change the extension, and write to my 8GB pendrive, but still I can’t boot it. Help!
.tar.gz is a compressed file format. Very commonly used in the Unix/Linux platform. On windows, you can decompress it using 7zip or WinRAR.
If you’re on Linux/Unix (or even mac os) you can simply decompress it with the command “tar -zxvf chromiumos.tar.gz”
Thanks, I finally able to boot Chrome OS. But I can’t connect to Wifi, does this mean my network card are not supported? I’m using Dell Inspiron laptop.
One more thing, how do you shut down the OS? I don’t see any way to do that.
To enable wifi, click the power icon on top. If it doesn’t work you’ll have to resort to Ethernet. That’s what happens to my notebook v
to shut down, press the power button briefly :)
Cool stuffs. Thanks for the review. I am also itching to try this, but then I would rather read all about it first, plus, I don’t have the luxury of time to play around with it.
Anyway, I would say it’s a one step to Google, and a giant leap to all the other Linux hacker. Imagine booting to your favorite Linux distro in 2 seconds after this?
I see, at first, I thought it’s Beta already.
But if it’s that fast, than I’m looking forward to what kinda monster Google will create.
Google Chrome OS is the most simplest OS I’ve seen so far. Without internet, you can never use it. But its nice though to see Google approaches in OS world, this can shake Microsoft, Apple and Linux as well. Good move!