This is a review of the SUSE version of Google Chrome OS. Developed by SUSE Linux. Requires minimal usage of RAM and works perfect in VirtualBox, even on a ”low specs” PC. Subscribe for daily Ubuntu videos.
Then Google announced the launch of its operating system, the Google Chrome OS. The launch is scheduled for H2 2010 and is expected to create a cult status among the open source community. Google OS already exists in its Android phone, which was in turn produced to compete with Appleâs revolutionary product, iPhone. Google Chrome OS would be an OS in the already choc a bloc world of OS. Apple, Microsoft, UNIX, Linux, open source OS, and now Google, the list seems endless. Google is tying up with Acer to bundle its OS and manufacture its brand of netbooks.
Microsoft preferred to maintain a wait and watch policy on the wake of Googleâs announcement. Though not a stranger to stiff market competition, Microsoft was waiting for a judicious moment to announce its latest product line. Microsoft is prone to the usual anti trust litigations and other controversies, and going by their past history, the entire tech community waited in bated breath for a new launch.
And Microsoft did just that. They announced the launch of Microsoft 7, their latest OS to hit the market in a monthâs time. Itâs a much improved version of Microsoft Vista Pro and will contain a host of new features. Early reviews say the OS boots quickly and sleep fast, and avoid much of the confusing interface decisions that have made many dislike Vista, the successor to Windows XP. Microsoft also dominates in the business world, where nearly every medium to large company standardizes around Microsoft Office. Microsoft is also at work on version 6 of its operating system for handheld devices, which it first launched in 2000.
Microsoft also announced the launch of MS Office 2010, with sleek design and an effective document management system. Also users would be given a preview of the cut-copy-paste feature. Taking a cue from Google Apps, and taking cloud computing to a whole new level, Microsoft is also implementing deploying its office products on its cloud or over the internet. Users can work with office apps online, and can create documents, presentations; spreadsheets etc. and store them on the Microsoft servers. One can eliminate considerable IT costs in deployment and maintenance. Microsoftâs cloud product for the enterprise space, Microsoft Azure is already open for reviews and will be a paid service, once launched.
Google and Microsoft are both taking computing to a whole new level and it is the users who would be spoilt for choice. Microsoft had largely grown complacent until Google came along to shake up categories. Gmail’s massive online storage capability and fancy programming made Microsoft hustle to upgrade its popular, though not user-friendly, web e-mail service. Google Maps led to Microsoft’s Live Maps, which now bests Google’s efforts in some ways.
Google has been winning the fight for the last few years, showing that it is still nimbler than the software giant from the Northwest. But the pendulum may be slowing, or even poised to swing the other way. With the innovations in Bing and the promise that Microsoft’s online Office offerings will be free and more fully featured than the Google equivalent, Microsoft is taking on Google where it matters for users: on the field of innovation.
Web Bee is specialized in writing articles about Web Design and Development, Mobile Web Application, SEO Services and many more. He is a regular contributor for his own interest.
Acer has finally released an Android smart phone running on the Snapdragon processor. Sadly, for those who have been waiting for a chance to see the Google OS run on a 1 GHz processor, that event has yet to pass. The Acer Liquid does indeed have a Snapdragon CPU, but the speed has been lowered to 768MHz.
While this Qualcomm Snapdragon 8250 processor does a good job of running the Android (good luck getting it to slow down, many reviewers have tried but to no avail), it is more a matter of status than actual performance. It’s like driving on a busy street, no matter what car you have, the speed will not matter; but people will still prefer to be stuck in traffic in a Ferrari than a regular car.
Spinlet Feature
Acer is showcasing Spinlet in the Liquid. While the Spinlet has yet to see much use on desktop computers, it is one of the first full-multimedia widgets. While this app has yet to see much use on desktop computers, it will certainly do wonders for a mobile phone. This is the primary reason why Acer has chosen to have Spinlet on the Liquid, as its multimedia functionalities will certainly get the attention of many people –especially music fans.
Phone Specifications
The Acer Liquid sports a 3.5 inch TFT capacitive touch screen with a display capability of 256 thousand colors. The resolution is a nice 480 x 800 pixels and it uses the Acer UI version 3.0 in addition to the Android 1.6. The screen also has an accelerometer sensor and a proximity sensor (so putting the screen against your face will not accidentally turn on the speaker phone).
The 5 mega pixel camera provides the complete package. It has both auto focus and LED flash, making shots easy despite cluttered backgrounds, bad lighting or shaky hands.
This quad band 2G and 3G HSDPA device supports GPS, Bluetooth, micro USB 2.0 and micro SD cards of up to 32GB. Media storage will rely heavily on the SD card since the phone only has 256MB of RAM and 512MB of ROM for programs and other functions.
Available on Clove and eXpansys
For anyone interested in getting their hands on Acer’s top Android phone, the Liquid is already available online through internet retailers Clove and eXpansys. The two prices of the phone on the two companies are not too different with eXpansys offering the device at a slightly higher cost but with a little promotion for heavy shoppers with its special 20 Pound rebate coupon.
Clove has the Liquid on retail, sim-free and unlocked with a nice 328.90 price tag. eXpansys has more festive little promo; for 339.99 Pounds you get the device and (as said above) a nice 20 Pound store voucher. eXpansys is offering a wide variety of accessories that would be worth using the voucher on.
Both stores have the phone readily available for shipping; on the eXpansys website, the Liquid will ship upon receipt of payment and buyers can expect the phone to arrive within one to two working days. The average shipping cost within the UK is 6.16 Pounds.
Pay a visit to Best Mobile Contracts to look at all the latest phone deals. There you can find all the latest Acer Liquid deals on offer. There are also hundreds of detailed mobile reviews to read.
New google OS on my msi wind booted from 1GB USB man stick. Download here: /chromeos.hexxeh.net/
Download the Google Chrome OS Virtual Machine.
Last week, Techcrunch reported rumors of the release of the Google Chrome OS. They stated that the info came from a reliable source, and indeed that source was reliable. Google had an event at their headquarters, and indeed provided new details and a demo of the Chrome OS. The Chromium Blog has some great videos that provide some additional information about Chrome OS as well.
The Chromium OS source code is available for download (Chromium OS is the open-source version of Google Chrome OS), and you can compile and build it. It took some time, but I did manage to do this on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) machine. I also managed to put together a VirtualBox virtual appliance that is all ready to go. I built a torrent for it, so feel free to download it here:
Download the Chromium OS VirtualBox Appliance Torrent
Please continue to seed, as I’m sure there will be many people out there wanting to try it out.
To use it, just start up VirtualBox, click File and then Import. Navigate to the chromiumos.ovf file and select it. The virtual appliance will be imported into VirtualBox and you should be good to go.
I also included a txt file that more or less has the commands I used to build it. You may be able to run it as a script, although I haven’t confirmed that it will work. I guess you could say I more or less took “script-like notes” as I was building Chromium OS.
If you hit Ctrl+Alt+T when you first log in, you’ll get a shell prompt. You can run “sudo su” (no quotes) to log in as root, and I’ve set the password to “password” (no quotes). If you use this machine for anything serious (although I doubt you would), be sure to change the password.
You should be running VirtualBox 3.0.12, and when you import the virtual appliance everything should be configured properly. If you get an error that says “network not connected and offline login fail” when you try to log in, be sure that the virtual network adapter is set to Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM).
If the network adapter is already properly configured but you are still seeing the error, try logging in with the user “chronos” with the password “password” (no quotes). This should log you in and bring up the chrome browser window. If you don’t see a Google Accounts login screen, try hitting the refresh button. That should bring up the Google Accounts login screen.
It is absolutely astounding how fast it boots. It really is nearly instant-on and takes a mere few seconds to bring up the login screen.
Once you log in with your Gmail account, it launches and you’ll see the Chromium interface open up to your Gmail. There is also a Google Calendar tab and a New Tab tab. The little chrome sphere appears in the upper left corner, but when you click on it you don’t get a menu as you see in some of the Chrome OS videos. Instead, you get a Google.com account login page.
As you can see, it looks very much like the Chrome OS screenshots that had surfaced last month. Of course, being that this is running on a virtual machine without any decent video drivers on the operating system, the resolution is quite low (800×600). Your dear old granddad may be the only one that actually finds it visually appealing at this resolution.
Right now the most impressive thing is how fast this operating system loads. Of course, it should load fast because there really is hardly anything there. In any case, it is rather neat to see an early release in action. The fact that it actually works on a virtual machine is quite promising. Eventually as drivers for more hardware are incorporated into it, it should be possible to run it your own real hardware.
I also found a VMWare virtual disk image on a Google Wave about the Chrome OS. You can download it here:
Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image
As of now, the link to the VMWare disk image is valid and the download works.
Update: I just went into the Chrome OS Wave I found with the link to the VMWare disk image, and apparently the poor guy that posted that file to Amazon Web Services ran up a $380 bill so he took the file down. Here’s the torrent of the same file posted up on Pirate Bay:
Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image Torrent
However, I haven’t tried using it, so I can’t confirm that it will run on VMWare without issue. Enjoy your Google Chrome OS virtual machines!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.
Five Reasons the Google Chrome OS Will Flop – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership
By Tony Bradley
Yesterday Google hosted a press event at its Mountain View campus to reveal a first glimpse at the Chrome OS. The excitement around the operating system has led to rampant rumors and speculation, but I question whether the Chrome OS is really worth any of this hype.
Google is Google. It has a Midas touch when it comes to web-based applications and services so its easy to get wrapped up in anticipation about a web-centric operating system from Google. Here are five reasons Chrome won’t live up to the hype.
Editor’s note: PC World contributor Jared Newman takes an alternate point of view in his Today@ blog “Five Reasons the Google OS will Succeed“. Think they are both wrong? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments)
1. Not everything runs in the cloud. I know Google has a web-centric, cloud-computing perspective on the world, but not everything runs from the cloud. Sure, Picassa and Flickr have some photo editing capabilities, but they’re not Adobe Photoshop.
That is just one example, but the point is that there are applications that pretty much have to be run locally. An operating system that is essentially just a web browser on steroids designed to run on low-end netbook hardware will not be able to fill that need.
2. The cloud isn’t always available. In order to run all of your applications from the cloud, you have to be connected to the cloud. Wi-Fi connections are becoming more ubiquitous, but there are still plenty of places I go where there is no Wi-Fi available.
An airplane is a good example. Airlines are beginning to implement wireless network availability in-flight, but usually for a fee. That basically renders a Chrome OS netbook useless while flying unless you cave and pay the exorbitant airline access fees.
3. Games. One of the driving forces behind PC hardware development and PC sales is gaming. Nobody needs a $750 graphics card to use Microsoft Office, and a 5.1 surround sound speaker system is a little overkill for checking email.
Sure, there are games on the web. Thousands of them. Facebook users waste spend weeks of time playing Mafia Wars and Farmville. But, Farmville is no Spore. Hardcore gamers want the raw horsepower that a PC provides.
4. Chrome web browser. Google’s Chrome web browser has been around for awhile. It has received some good reviews and has experience a relative degree of success in a crowded browser market.
That is admirable, but the Chrome web browser hasn’t exactly caught fire. It isn’t steamrolling Internet Explorer, or even Firefox, to capture browser market share. If the world isn’t tripping over itself to get the web browser, it seems safe to assume we also won’t flock to drop our Windows or Mac based hardware for a netbook running a glorified version of the browser we weren’t using in the first place.
5. We can do most of that now for free. Google doesn’t intend to offer the Chrome OS as a free application like most things Google. The plan is to make the Chrome OS available pre-installed on netbook hardware by the 2010 holiday season.
We can already do most, if not all, of what Chrome OS promises to deliver. Using a Windows 7 or Linux-based netbook, users can simply not install anything but a web browser and connect to the vast array of Google products and other web-based services and applications.
Netbooks have been successful at capturing the low-end PC market, and they provide a web-centric computing experience today. I am not sure why we should get excited that a year from now we’ll be able to do the same thing, but locked into doing it from the fourth-place web browser.
The Chrome OS is half Linux and half Chrome web browser. Netbooks built on the Chrome OS will basically be web appliances running an operating system that is really just a web browser on steroids.
Google is virtually synonymous with the web, so its hard not to get excited. The Chrome OS may have something to offer the netbook audience, but it is not a threat to existing desktop operating systems at all.
My PC World counterpart Jared Newman seems to agree that the Chrome OS will essentially be a niche operating system. Jared feels, though, that Google is not trying to take over the operating system market and that, relative to what the OS is intended to be, Chrome will be a success. Perhaps.
If it didn’t have the word ‘Google’ at the front, nobody would care and most people would simply dismiss the effort. Chrome OS will be little more than a niche product and it begs the question ‘why bother?’
 Microsoft Internet Explorer |
64.64% |
| Firefox |
24.07% |
| Safari |
4.42% |
| Chrome |
3.58% |
| Opera |
2.17% |
| Opera Mini |
0.35% |
| Netscape |
0.33% |
| Mozilla |
0.11% |
| Konqueror |
0.05% |
| ACCESS NetFront |
0.04% |
| Playstation |
0.03% |
| Danger Web Browser |
0.01% |
| Obigo |
0.01% |
| Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer |
0.01% |
| Blazer |
0.00% |
| Unknown | 0.00% |
| MaxThon |
0.00% |
| WebTV |
0.00% |
| Lotus Notes |
0.00% |
| BlackBerry |
0.00% |
| iCab |
0.00% |
| ANT Galio |
0.00% |
Tony Bradley tweets as @PCSecurityNews, and can be contacted at his Facebook page .
© 2007 PC World Communications
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
