Chrome OS-Blog.com

You wanna know which hardware Chrome OS can be run on? There’s a list on Chromium.org providing you with details about certain models. One day after release it seems that it works best on Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC. The whole list is available here.

Google has finally released an early version of its new open source operating system Chrome OS. This is a step-by-step guide to running it within Sun VirtualBox, a multi-platform, free virtualization software, making your pleasure all-free! There will be a video version of this how-to as well, so check back for updates. Click here to read through the step-by-step guide.

Those of you who want to take a closer look at Google Chrome OS should check out the Design Documents, that have been released yesterday. There are some general ones as well as special documents dealing with security, firmware and the platform. There’s pretty much to read though. Please post anything you find important in the comment section of this article (no registration needed).

This video shows the Chrome OS user interface as it is planned. In the current version of the OS, however, this is far from being fully implemented. Nevertheless, this video will make you even more curious of what is about to come. Click here to see the full video and a short description of what is said in it.

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.

Will Drewry, Security Engineer for Chrome OS, explains in this video how security enhancements of Chrome OS are achieved. It is the second of four videos released along with the source code of Chrome OS. See the video and a short description here.

Along with the source code, Google released several videos covering infos about their new operating system Chrome OS. This one is the first of four. Click here to see it and to get a brief overview.

Today Google released a first version of its new operating system Chrome OS during a presentation in their HQ. There are also some new videos that I’m going to introduce to you ASAP. You can find all news on the Chromium website and the corporate’s blog. Check back here for updates!

According to an article on TechCrunch, Google is going to release Chrome OS within a week from now, thereby keeping their promise to give “more updates” in fall 2009. If true, Chrome OS will be available before 20th November, 2009. TechCrunch claims to have this information from “a reliable source”.

I’m expecting an early version with limited compatibility, because when they announced Chrome OS in July they said they’d need a lot of help from the open source community. This help could very likely be needed in driver support. Depending on which kernel Chrome OS will be based on there already are more or less drivers available for the most popular hardware components. But Google resolved to build an OS that runs on any hardware (including ARM-based machines), so there’s probably a lot of work to do on this subject. I hope even the first version will be compatible to major netbooks from companies Google is working together with (Asus EeePC, Acer Aspire One, HP Mini, …) and major virtualization systems (VMware, Sun VirtualBox, …).

DownloadSquad recently discovered a “mount library” in the Chrome browser’s source code. It seems to be monitoring newly-inserted devices like external hard rives or USB sticks. This is something you’d normally expect from an OS, not a browser, and may be a hint to an Explorer-like behaviour of the browser.

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An article on Gizmodo gave the fake Chrome OS beta version heavy promotion. Read the update of my original article at http://chromeos-blog.com/chrome-os-beta-fake/.