Google Chrome alpha review
Most of the people who want to get hold of Chrome OS and use it just now are developers. However, if you are not a developer and you are not sure about compiling source code from the Google Chrome OS site, you could go to a torrent site such as www.isohunt.com and download an ISO image or a USB boot image. If you do know how to compile source code and write software, you will want to find that and get to work on refining or improving Google Chrome OS. Using Google search, you can find the Google download page for the source code and you will also find instructions on how to build it.
Mere days after the release of the Chrome OS source code, internet blogs and news sites are alive with the news that a fake Chrome OS has been circulating. However, this is the way that present-day operating systems are released. In the world of open source software and distributed networks this does not matter. You can either rewrite the software as something else or offer it to someone else in another country. For example, Google itself has recognised this fact and offers a service called Orkut which is much used. Some of the people who don’t like Google Wave have found a Drupal API which does something similar – do-it-yourself Wave with you in the driving seat. There is more of this kind of thing going on than you might realise. As well as the above, the news is that both Google and Canonical are to work together on Chrome OS. Canonical and Ubuntu have become very acceptable in England. You can walk into a Wi-Fi hotspot and find people using laptops with Ubuntu installed in them. It’s no longer something out of the ordinary.
Chrome OS is all about being fast and light, which is something that MS Windows isn’t. That could be really bad for Microsoft considering the hordes of people who are unhappy with MS Windows but unwilling to pay for a Mac or bother with a version of GNU/Linux such as Ubuntu or one of the others. However, in spite of this the claim is that just now the GNU/Linux desktop accounts for 30% or 32% of the netbook market. That is a lot, far more than Macintosh. It is thought that GNU/Linux will eventually outstrip MS Windows in the netbook market. If you speak to someone like Mark Shuttleworth or Dr Rudeiger Berlich (formerly of SuSE GmbH), they will look at you in a serious way and try to suggest that you must have got your facts wrong somewhere. However, the fact remains that the GNU/Linux desktop is now being used much more than before. The author was one of the people who suggested to Mr Shuttleworth that Ubuntu would be the leading GNU/Linux desktop if he were to put a bit more work into it.
As we begin to emerge into a post Microsoft era, it might be that we will see a diminishing of the Microsoft tax that so many commercial organisations and governments and individuals have had to pay for so long. Microsoft will most likely not go away. They will be here for some years to come. However, there will be a trend in the coming years for international economies to move away from the Microsoft model towards a more manageable set of figures for costs of software and management of that software once it is in place. There are already many projects out there that are doing just that, such as the large-scale project that is running in Vienna and other European cities and the German government’s plan to use GNU/Linux desktops everywhere in its foreign office. A brave GNU future.
Chrome OS is not finished yet and so not really of much use to anyone. Recent netbooks can use just about any version of GNU/Linux. This makes cut-down netbook software obsolete. However, operating systems that use online applications are in demand, as are operating systems like Chrome OS and Jolicould.
Richard Ibbotson
This article originally appeared in issue 83 of Linux User & Developer. Click here for more reviews from the magazine.
[...] Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
[...] Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
One question:
Where did you get this “beta” version? AFAIK, Google has only released the Chromium source code so far. I’ve yet to see an official Google release.
Anything out there has been built by enthusiasts like Hexxeh from that source.
Chrome OS is not beta yet — if it even exists. It is pre-alpha at best, though, as I said, I’m not aware of an actual Chrome OS download – only Chromium OS built by third parties (like Dell, etc).
[...] Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
No thanks. I want a real OS, not a gimmick.
I have 2 computers : my “newest” one uses Ubuntu 9.10 and my “old” test-bench has BrowserLinux-Chrome onboard —> a stripped-down PuppyLinux with only the Chrome-browser on it. Actually a Chrome OS “avant-la-lettre”
I just want to say that every Linux distro can be used the same way Chrome OS will be used.
“the claim is that just now the GNU/Linux desktop accounts for 30% or 32% of the netbook market”
That is utter rubbish. Just about everyone I know that purchased a netbook pre-installed with Linux immediately installed a pirated version of Windows. They bought the cheapest netbook they could find, which was Linux, and stole Windows. Linux is claiming these people as users? haha.
Nice write-up! It’s a v.good thing Google have been supporting FOSS & pushing the envelope an’ all, but, I’m not going to put my trust a cloud! …vapourware?
As a netbook user; I would be more interested in Ulteo Linux by Gaël Duval (founder of Linux Mandrake hall of fame), than in any future with the corporate giant Google.
Hi. Seriously, I think Google ChromeOS raises more questions than it actually answers. At this time, I can only wait to test it before making any conclusions about whether it is here to stay at all.
Let’s not forget that the market is suddenly shifting from netbooks to slate or tablet PCs or whatever they are referred to. Will that change the ChromeOS strategy? Only time will tell.
@ David
I bought a Sony VAIO laptop pre-installed with Windows Vista. I have Windows Vista because I had no choice. I deleted it and installed Ubuntu Linux.
Does Microsoft claim me as a user?? After all, I DID pay for the Windows license.
A lot more people use Linux than you think. Ideal system setup would be a dual-boot. Best of both worlds.
I never did understand the popularity of netbooks. After all, even on a linux distro, who in their right mind would want ANY PC with a 1.6 ghz processor with 1 GB system RAM MAXIMUM!?? Thats like saying I want a PC from 25 years ago.. I never did understand their appeal in the first place.
As for a Chrome OS, if we’re talking light and fast, a Gnome look-alike would definitely not be it. Something more like xfce or iceVM would appeal more to users I would think, for Gnome and KDE are known to be considered bloatware in the industry. If your running KDE, you might as well be running Windows on top of a linux kernel, and Gnome isn’t a whole lot better.
Macintosh organization? do you even understand what a license is?
this is a terrible review imo.
Good writeup. Do not believe the desktop useage figures, but I think it is getting there. For cloud we have shared space at dropbox and Ubuntuone and real cloud by buying Amazon S3. With GMail, hotmail, flickr etc, what else do you really need if a wordprocessor and a spreadsheet are also online?
tcoburn has a distorted sense of history. 266MHz was a good x86 processor speed 15 (not 25) years ago. AT buses ran at 66MHZ at best. 64MBytes was a good sized memory then. Windows 95 was the MS OS. Unix was the workstation OS of choice. IBM mainframe services ran CP/CMS and 1 MByte was a good sized environment. Programmers then would have given their right arm for a machine of 1.6GHZ with 1GByte of memory. Today such freely available machines encourage bloat and waste with little to show for it except massive disks full of trash. Desktops (KDE, Gnome, xfce…etc) don’t achieve anything apart from a little organisation and convenience for the Command Line challenged. Netbooks running a Linux OS, without the 160GByte hard disk that windows requires for its page file support and other disk trash, with a moderate size SSD are very energy efficient and robust and can provide a development environment for a thinking programmer as well as a mobile device for internet access and entertainment for the traveller. I often wonder what people do with four processors and powerful graphics cards except games and fastra to provide teraflop compute power using 4KWatts, and needing refrigeration. Parallel computing can work well on some medical imaging programs, but array processors have been tricky to use effectively.
Anyway keep the peace, enjoy!
If you ever read this i like using Linux Kernel with Drivers from a 3 1/2.
I used a 386sx20 msdos6 & 2400baud to a server with Lynx & Pine for a bbs.
$2.95 a month 24/7 unlimited http://www.295.ca here in Canada for dialup:)
Maybe Google at McGill could offer students free dialup for the semestor.
[...] Chrome beta, looking good. [...]
[...] See the article here: Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
I don’t really get it. I booted Chrome OS from the DVD into VirtualBox. I got a chopped down OpenSuse and a Chrome webbrowser. I Put the sound and video right, opened Chrome web browser (now called Chrome OS, for some reason).
I know I can open my gmail and google office in Chrome, but it wasn’t any different to opening it in Firefox.
In the review (issue 85) you show a picture of a web page that is the google applications, I didn’t see that and couldn’t find a way to get it. But it doesn’t make any difference because I can get to them all from the top menu in google, in any browser.
Did I miss something or is this what Chrome OS is, just a browser that does nothing more than any other browser?
Well, one thing more, try this experiment. Open Chrome browser (on any machine), open Firefox (on any machine). Go into youtube on both. You always get much better speeds with Chrome. Makes you wonder if non-Chrome browsers are choked.Can’t say that other web sites are noticably faster to render.
Sorry to the Google people if I’m missing something here, but I really could not see what Chrome OS was other than Chrome with the letters OS at the end of it.
What's your opinion?