Running Chrome OS

(My ramblings as I wandered off to the Chrome OS era)

Well, hmm now I think thats not entirely true. I would have wanted it to run on Dell Vostro 1500. I had to steal someone else's :). There were hiccups. Any OSS usually needs bit of effort to make it run/usable. When google launched Chrome OS last year, I immediately went to the website to see if an image is available. Google never shared the image - instead gave a list of steps to build the source on Ubuntu. They were tedious and my Dell Vostro was almost dead. I still wanted to give it a shot (long shot of course) but was preoccupied with work. And then I bought a Macbook Pro on Thanksgiving. It has been just a fantastic platform and hats off to Apple to pull in such masterpieces every time.

One of my friend recently mentioned that his laptop is not running for the last year. The reason was something related to OS as he mentions. I already had Opensuse on the USB which I sometime used when I felt like working on Linux. My Windows is breathing its last due to bad virus issues. That gave me the motivation to finally search for Chrome OS image again. I got the resource here. Well, thanks to my windows laptop I ended up downloading the image for some 3-4 times and the worst case was it went till 200 MB and stopped. Mac to rescue. The whole distro is 327MB - so your wireless has to hold and not get disconnected (My Dell Vostro does). So, once I completed the transfer and image burning on my USB - with bated breath I tried to boot it up.

It didn't. Black screen all over. Complete let down. What to do now. I read some more. May be the md5 is wrong and file is corrupt. May be I did not format the USB properly. My search hit this page next (see the parent wiki page too; lot of info). Dell Vostro 1500 - Does not boot. Then there were few comments about Flow and Zero (builds). The next thing I saw was there were listings for Apple.

There were 2 reasons why I did not want to try it on my Mac. First - its Mac. Its pristine. Its still a virgin and I have not fiddled with it like I do with my windows/linux. The other problem was that I need to burn a separate image for the Mac (I guess) coz of the hardware differences. That would have taken some time to start the entire process again.

Solution - I saw in the list that HP works. It had like Y Y Y Y everywhere. Thats it. I know somebody who has a HP laptop. Its like my Dell Laptop - almost dead. But I had to try once. Thanks Rohan - I had to reboot your laptop to experiment this one.

Well, well. Initial start 22 seconds for the first (Google had 7 on its demo, hence there is no image available from Google. I guess the time is something which can be played around with). I am counting this from the moment I press the button. In 22 seconds you are on login screen. This time reduced to 15 in the next 4-5 boots. And its simple to use. Chrome Browser is amazingly (read lightning) fast & it feels light. The build version is of 20100213 0.5.31. It shows another version 6.0.321.0 which looks like the Chrome Browser version but I need to google further to verify that.

I could not find few important features like pinning & app area. But Ctrl-Alt-T brings to the familiar console and then the world is yours. This is perfect for Netbooks - there is no question about it. There are nifty UI tricks which are eye-candy. I don't have any screenshots coz I did not find the print screen feature (well thats something which might be useful to report bugs). Had I been running VmWare or VirtualBox, I could have posted few images. So task in hand is to get an external HDD and download all necessary stuff from my Windows BOX (>30G of my class lectures) and kill it. I mean put in something better (Linux for now).

Okay, thats it for now. Till Rohan is not in - I can decimate some more of his laptop functionality and do some cooking. Its good to see that I finally could get this one done. My plans to watch "Kick Ass" did not work out, but I can say the evening was worthwhile and Chromium is a kick-ass OS.