A Quick Look at Google Chrome OS
Google has their own operating system that is being developed for Netbooks – call it Chrome OS or Chromium, your choice. I downloaded a version bootable by USB, developed by a very smart 17-year-old. With bootable USB in hand, I was able to get Chrome OS running on my laptop. Here are my first impressions:
Basically, Chromium is Google’s Chrome browser set up as an operating system. When you boot up and login, you are put into Chrome. From there, you can use Google Apps to get your work done via the “cloud.”
There is no way to save things to the hard drive or install native applications. It’s designed that way. You have to have Internet access to do anything.
This might be fine, but in my first attempt to use the OS, it did manage to find my wifi network, but froze on the authentication. It also didn’t seem to like my external mouse much. Ultimately, the system hung and I shut it down. I’ll play with it more later.
I’d say, this is a promising “lite” operating system, if just to have on USB for those times when your hard drive dies and you just want to login to the Internet to check your email. Whether it will be robust enough for daily use remains to be seen.
Thank you for the Chrome thoughts.
Yeah its ability to run without tinkering is valid. My MO is puppylinux (of course) on USB stick, have played with the LinpusLite which is robust but limited and use more resources than Puppy.
The last year I’ve encouraged people to use Portableapps on any windows system from 2000 onwards if they have to stay with Windows for whatever reason. Still using the earlier platforms and they will run on 2000 from a 4G thumbdrive, very nicely. All open source apps apart from the ones I”ve adapted that came with scanners and downloads, all run without a skerrick of registry writing.
Well worth the journey.
Would like to ask your ideas on this… I feel the current lot of Firefox browsers have reintroduced huge bloat and aren’t so rasy to use; I have preference for ver 2.0.0.20. Any thoughts?