Chrome OS-Blog.com

Acer plans to be the first hardware vendor to release a Chrome OS based netbook in 2010. Their goal is to sell at least one million devices this year. Till now, no technical specs have been released. Check back here for updates.

In an interview with Digitimes Acer chairman and CEO J.T. Wang announced that Acer will be the first hardware vendor to offer a netbook with Chrome OS preinstalled. According to several industry sources the release date will be in the second half of 2010. This is the second time acer uses a Google OS. They already have their Aspire D250 with Windows XP and Google Android dual-boot capabilities on the market.

I added a description of how to convert an .img file to a .vdi file for Sun’s VirtualBox into my article Download: Chrome OS image for USB drives. It’s really easy and lets you use my newly created Chrome OS build from December 2nd in VirtualBox as well as from a USB stick.

In Chrome OS, there are some little known (not to say secret) keyboard shortcuts available for getting a linux terminal, developer tools, switching between windows, an on-screen keyboard etc. This article gives a summary of them. Click here to read the full article.

Every two weeks I create a fresh build of Chrome OS which can be run from USB drives on almost any machine. Contrary to the very first release from November recent releases support various wireless network controllers. You can download it either from one of my servers or via the BitTorrent network. Once a new version is released, all previous versions are removed, so please don’t link them directly but link to this page. Click here for download links and a further description.

Doug Anson from Dell made a special Chrome OS build for the Dell Mini 10v netbook. He finally got the wireless card working, although you have to wait for five to ten minutes until it actually detects wireless networks. You can find the image as an *.img file here. Note: all usernames/passwords are set to “dell”. A tutorial on how to get a bootable image file onto a USB stick is available here.

Google released the Chrome OS source and now everybody can create his own build. But how do you get your build  image file on a botable USB stick? This tutorial describes the process step by step for machines running on Windows or Linux. Click here to read the entire Chrome OS on USB stick tutorial.

Some guys from the german open source magazine heise open analyzed components that are used in Chrome OS. We now know which standard applications are running in the background managing the system. I’m giving you an overview in this article. Click here to read the full article.

This video shows a demonstration of Chrome OS from the initial presentation at the Google headquarters two days ago. You can see the amazingly fast boot up procedure as well as the user interface. Pretty cool stuff, if you ask me. Click here to see the full video.

Martin Bligh, Software Engineer for Chrome OS, released another video with information about the open source character of Chrome OS. It seems that Google colaborates with many other open source project to get Chrome OS on the way. Watch the full video here!