chrome Archive

According to a digitimes article Asus plans on having one of the first netbooks that runs exclusively on Google Chrome as its OS. This isn’t surprising as Asus is usually one of the first adopters of new technology, remember the recent Android/Windows dual boot netbook from Asus?

A netbook running on Chrome will require a couple of things including an SSD drive. The question is will Asus go with a 64GB SSD drive and only Google Chrome, or will they employ a hybrid drive with both SSD and HD and do a Chrome/Windows dual boot option. We’ll have to wait and see but will really be exciting is if they go with the first option and price the netbook at $99 or less (including subsidies from Google).

The netbook will be launched in the second half of 2010 which coincides with the timeframe Google has given for the launch of their OS, so the two add up.

Well Engadget (with a little help from an online hacker) has managed to build up a nice little Chromium OS image and put it on a bootable jump drive. The result is a very fast boot time (around 14 seconds) which isn’t as good as the 7 second bootup we saw earlier but it’s moving in the right direction.

Checkout the video at the end of the post for the bootup. Also, the image they used to boot from can be downloaded from a torrent here.

via Engadget

Well it was only a matter of time (a few hours) before Google released the source code for their new netbook operating system “Chrome” and hackers compiled the build and got it up and booting. You can use your logicianal magicianism skills to find some of these iso’s floating around the “tubes” I’m sure.

The running joke around google is, “how is Chrome OS different from the Chrome browser?”. The answer, it’s not. Check out the video at the end of the post and you can see that the OS is just essentially a browser that the computer boots into. In our story yesterday you saw that Google promised 7 second boot times and no local storage or programs, they’re all run from the cloud. Well you better have a runcore SSD if you want 7 second boots because it takes about 30 on an old netbook with a slow HD, but that’s to be expected.

So if you want to save yourself alot of trouble and unsupported drivers, then just download the Chrome browser and you’ll see exactly what the OS will be like. If not, go grab the source code and happy debugging!

Just like we reported earlier this week, Google has released the source code for their new operating system made specifically for netbooks, Chrome. They made a few interesting announcements at their press event today and one was that it will be around a year before Chrome is available to consumers.

If you’re a programmer though you can download it here, but there are no beta releases ready. Another interesting note was that every application built into the OS will be web based, which will make it light, fast and responsive. That is assuming you have a good internet connection, but you can’t really do anything on your netbook without one anyway.

You won’t be able to go buy or download Chrome when it comes out, instead it will be offered only on specific devices and will come pre-loaded. So if you want Chrome you’ll have to buy a Chrome device.

Chrome OS netbooks will not have traditional hard disk drives, but will rely on non-volatile flash memory and internet-based storage for saving all of your data. Another interesting fact is that users won’t even have to bother with anti-virus software: Google claims it will monitor code to prevent malicious activity in Chrome OS web apps.

Oh and did we mention that the boot time will be around 7 seconds? Not too shabby.

It will be interesting to see what these netbooks will ultimately be like when they come out.