Chromium OS Zero: First Impressions

I got focused yesterday and installed "ChromiumOS Zero" on a USB stick and booted it up on my (normally Ubuntu 9.10) 64-bit AMD Opteron 3000+ uni-processor system.

(Click on any screenshots to see them in full size).

ChromiumOS Zero is a version of Google's open source Chrome OS. "Chromium" appears to be the the open source project euphemism for a product that will become "Chrome" when its ready to be distributed by Google directly as a 'product'.  We've seen this transition with the Chromium / Chrome web browser.

Zero is the result of work by a so-far anonymous developer known only as "Hexxeh". Whoever he is, he's done a pretty good job of making ChromiumOS Zero fairly easy to obtain, install and run.

Following his instructions for Windows, (just happened to be the Vista PC I was on) I was able to create a bootable ChromeOS USB stick in a couple of minutes once the files were downloaded. This amounts to little more than unarchiving (using 7-zip) the  ChromeOS image from its compressed tar ball and then using a Windows utility to burn the image to the USB stick.

Done.

The system refused to boot from the USB stick on the system it was made on (Intel Dual-core E6300 with 4GB / RAM, 4 HDs, dual-booting Ubuntu and Vista) but happily booted on my uni-processor AMD system that runs Ubuntu 9.10 alone. Not sure why the first system didn't work. The boot part of the BIOS setup is the same as on the system it did work on. Whatever. On the first system the boot paused very briefly then proceeded to GRUB, ignoring the USB stick waving its hand in the air.

Once booted, I found (as expected) ChromiumOS is basically the Chrome web browser with a couple tabs at left you can't close and couple of tiny status button at top righ for network and....something else. Didn't quite work out what the mini-button on the left at top-right was for.

ChromiumOS runs well enough, though it is a bit jerky. That may be due to data transfer lag from the cheap 4GB USB stick used as the boot source. The more tabs I had open, the slower it seemed to get. This was partly due to some of the tabs having animations running in the background. Closing tabs seemed to perk it up. Despite having 4GB of RAM the system seemed constrained in some way. Speed aside, it did not crash once.

There are a number of web apps predefined on the Home page. You can add more apps via Chrome Extensions. I had the "Chromed Bird" twitter app installed in a couple of monutes and was using that quite happily.

Looks like a very clever strategy at play here with extensions to an existing browser effectively functioning as applications for ChromeOS before it is fully baked as a commerical operating system.

ChromiumOS Zero was on the Internet by default. DHCP clearly works as does my cheapo 100Mbps ethernet card.

At top right, when I clicked on an anonymous little box, the UI displayed the available network interfaces seeing correctly both my ethernet adaptor and my WiFi card....and listing the wifi APs within range just to prove it was actually working.

Youtube video worked, slowly and not at all smoothly, but there was no sound. It may be that it was trying to use the new HTML5 video instead of Flash as I had earlier that day told that YT account to be set for HTML5. I don't know if that is a cookie thing on a given PC or a feature logged against my account no matter where I login from.

The Options menu put me into a page where I could configure the usual browser features. There was also prominent configuration capability for touch-sensitive devices.

Having had a play, I was wondering how to shut it down. There didn't appear to be any way to do it, but I did want to just power off. Consulting the FAQ, I found that the provisional way to shutdown is Cntl+Alt+1 to bring up a fullscreen linux terminal / command prompt...then enter "sudo shutdown -h now" in classic linux style. When it asks for the password, you enter "facepunch"....Hexxeh's root password. Lovely. No security problems here! :-)  Presumably anyone running it can give themselves system-wide authority using sudo. Must try it when I have a minute or three.

Overall, ChromiumOS Zero is very much a work in progress. But if ChromeOS  ends up being as fast and robust as the Chrome browser is, it will be a powerful and very useful operating system for a wide range of devices ranging from smartphones to desktop computers.