Google’s Chromium OS is, uh, a browser

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 14 years and 3 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Google’s forthcoming Chromium OS has gotten a lot of buzz recently. My trusty old EeePC 4G Surf has become quite the sandbox for trying out different netbook operating systems, so of course now it is running Chromium. I downloaded the latest of Hexxeh’s Chrome builds, copied the image onto a 1gb thumb drive, and then installed the image onto the SSD in my EeePC. It boots to the signon screen in about 15 seconds:

You login using your Google/Gmail credentials, since this is an OS for the cloud (of course, I had to login with the default ‘facepunch’ from Hexxeh’s FAQ first so I could join the netbook to my wireless network before it could authenticate my Google login).

As you can see from the login screen in my video above, it’s not well suited for the smaller 7″ screen on my EeePC. The settings dialog, for instance, goes off the bottom of the screen and the usual Alt+mouse to drag a window doesn’t seem to work. Also, since this was installed as an image, the SSD drive looks like just a 1gb drive so I’m missing out on the other 3gb for storage. Graphics performance isn’t that great either.

Other than that, I’ve successfully turned my netbook into a almost fully functional Ubuntu machine into a device that only runs a browser. 😮 Hmmm. I guess this is the simplicity Google is shooting for, but it’s almost too simple for me.

Oh, and while I’m talking about Google … why won’t they let me put my iGoogle tabs back on top of the page instead of on the left? It’s a ridiculous waste of space, and it’s even worse on the smaller screen of my EeePC.

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