A look at Google Chromium OS

“Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more
secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web.”

A lot of people are looking forward to the final release of Google’s new operating system, based on it’s browser, Chromium OS.  Although aimed to be lightning fast so users can have the lengths of the internet at their fingertips, it’s still currently in VERY early stages of development.  You can already find various copies of Chromium OS all over the web, either in VM format, or images you can burn directly to a USB drive and boot from. But even in some of the highly tweaked builds, such as the Flow Chrome OS build by Hexxeh, you won’t see the speed it’s intended to have.  I’ve tested a few different builds, and so far, Flow seems to run the smoothest.

Right from the login screen, you connect to the internet and begin surfing.  Users login with their Google or Gmail account and are brought directly to the Chrome browser, not a desktop.  If you aren’t able to automatically connect to the internet, you can login using the username and password provided with the build you download to attempt to configure settings manually.

It’s still pretty far from being a finished product, but there’s full support for accessing removable devices, and in the newest Hexxeh build, support for almost all NVIDIA gpu’s including hardware acceleration, as well as various other hardware devices.  Also, being built on linux, you can get complete access to a shell terminal by pressing ctrl + alt + t, which is something I had to play around with in order to get networking to function properly.  From here, it’s just like your normal shell terminal in linux, similar to Ubuntu flavors, although the only editor that comes with is vi, so you might want to brush up on vi commands before going around changing things (note: root password should be the same as the offline login password unless your build specifies otherwise)

If you are able to ping direct IP addresses, but still can’t access the internet, the problem is most likely the dns in /etc/resolv.conf (you need to be root to change this).  By default, there is one nameserver set to ’127.0.0.1′.  To set some proper nameservers, highlight the ’1′ as shown in the top image on the left and type ‘d9<right_arrow>‘, to indicate ‘delete 9 characters to the right’.  From here you can press ‘a‘ (insert after cursor), and enter the nameservers you wish to use, followed by the escape key to indicate the end of input.  In my example, I used Google’s public DNS servers which are ’8.8.8.8′ and ’8.8.4.4′ and seem to work fine.  Once you have a couple valid nameservers in there, you can write the file by entering ‘:‘ and typing ‘w!‘ to write the file overriding the read-only error, and then ‘:q‘ to exit the editor.  If you can successfully ping domains now, you can exit the terminal and return to the browser.

Get Google Chrome OS:

If you want to give Chrome OS a try, here’s a list of a couple sites that have different builds available for download and pretty easy instructions for installing or setting it up.  Of course if you’re feeling really adventurous, you could go for the DIY method and build your own!

• gdgt build – vmdk image (registration required)
• Hexxeh builds – vmdk image, usb image
• torrent – vmdk image