Some of you may not have heard of Google Chrome OS/Chromium OS. In short, Google decided it was time for a lightweight, easy to use netbook operating system:
After a read of the Chromium OS build documentation, it was a pretty smooth ride for the command line. I used Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) 64-bit, fully updated – coincidentally what the Google Chrome OS team recommends and uses for their build environments.
I noticed some non-fatal errors while compiling the operating system, but for the most part I found it to be a well documented procedure ending with the option to either boot from hard drive or USB drive, or create a VMware virtual machine. I opted for the latter, due to possible hardware dependencies and ease of distribution.
Here’s how my build turned out:
Success!
The distribution is completely unmodified, I let the terminal run its course throughout the entire build process, passing arguments and commands to it when necessary. Please keep in mind that this build of Chromium OS was sourced directly from a Git repository, so there may be some surprises and glitches. I’ve tested the virtual machine under the following host environments:
- Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit, VMware Workstation 7.0.1 build-227600
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, VMware Workstation 7.0.1 build-227600
I will be uploading the finalized VMware image and configuration file for others to use as soon as I find a suitable 500+ MiB storage website. I’m unsure as to how Workstation 6.5 or earlier will handle the optimized VMware configuration, so I’ve provided the original configuration file (Chromium OS.vmx.old) that was automatically generated along side the disk image, for those using an older version of the virtualization program.
All in all, Chromium OS seems to be a very straight forward approach to using your netbook soley for web applications. How it catches on later this year, when it’s released, is going give us a deeper understanding of how we use our computers in relation to the world wide web.
UPDATE
I’ve uploaded the Virtual Machine archive, you can grab the file at http://www.mediafire.com/?z4t0io0jlzm. The archive is 189 MiB and extracts to 571 MiB.
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