Native Tests of Chrome on Netbooks Successful | thechromesource - Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Resources

Native Tests of Chrome OS on Netbooks Successful

Posted on 29. Nov, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey in News

I was browsing the Dell website recently, trying to see what existing netbook models in their lineup would best fit the Chrome OS. Since Chrome would ideally be distributed free to manufacturers, I was surprised to not see Dell’s name on the list of manufacturers that were planning on working with Google in developing devices that worked with Chrome since without licensing fees that are tacked on to Windows netbooks, a comparable netbook sold by Dell would be competitive as it would surely sell for less.

Well, as it turns out the Dell Linux team has put an install on a Dell Mini 10v and they have released the image file as well. An interesting item of note about the install is that the team was unable to get the wireless hardware to seamlessly talk to the OS. As a consequence, it takes quite a bit of time to actually get connected wirelessly. This is despite the fact that the wired connection tested solid. I was pondering this issue the other day, as the ability for users to be able to easily get connected to the net is going to become a big deal when running Chrome, and while the Dell Linux team reported a native hardware start-up of about 12 seconds, its not a good thing when it takes the OS’s connection manager over five minutes to make Chrome useful unless there is a wire around – and who wants to deal with that?

What motivated the folks over at Dell to try this experiment was Engagdet’s install of the Chrome source code to a Vostro A860 netbook, booting the machine natively from a usb device. This is the same method with which the Dell techies used to boot the Mini 10v. I also came a across this video of the first touchscreen device with a native Chrome OS install on an Asus EeePC Tablet T91 by a Brazilian blog called Techguru. It is certainly something worth noting:

All of this is coming out less than seven days after the release of the source code from Google. This makes things pretty exciting about what’s probably coming next, whatever that may be.