Chrome OS-Blog.com

After four months there’s finally a new release to download. The build routine has become a lot faster and easier to use. It can be executed on 64-bit systems only, however, so I had to install a fresh Ubuntu 9.10 first in order to create it. There are some obvious changes and a lot of changes under the hood, so it definitely makes sense to try out this one. You can configure your network connection before trying to login with a Google account now, which was a long-awaited feature in the community. You can also sign up for a new Google account from the login screen now.

I’m offering to versions for download now: one for use on USB drives and one for use with VMWare Player. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to make it run in VirtualBox, but I haven’t tried it on many systems, so it may be worth a try to use the VMWare version in VirtualBox. Please leave comments on your progress (no registration required).

Oh, yeah, and here is the link to the download page…

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.

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 of Google Chrome OS, explains the concept of the operating system’s fast boot capability in this video. Chrome OS just seems to leave out all unnecessary steps in order to start a browser. See the video and a short description here.

The Google Operating System Blog publishes a list of features that users wish to be included in Chrome OS. As I do too, users emphasize the importance of offline features in order to have an adequate operating system. It is supposed to be fast regarding the boot-up process and while working with it. Besides, the users want it to run Windows applications, which is a rather difficult task to be confronted with, as it will be running a linux kernel. Using a virtual machine environment or WINE, however, even this is technically possible. I hope they have a built-in disk encryption, too.