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Chrome OS Zero VM Image Available

Daniel Cawrey — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:03:49 +0000

One of the problems that I experienced with Chrome OS Zero is that I was unable to get the image that Hexxeh released to work in either VMWare or VirtualBox. I spent an entire morning over the weekend banging my head to no avail, although it’s possible I couldn’t get it to work because of said head-banging. Fortunately, Hexxeh now has a VM image up on his site, so for those of you wanting to run Chrome OS Zero using VMWare, here is your chance!

Note: According to Hexxeh’s Twitter account, this doesn’t appear to work with Sun’s VirtualBox. I assumed he tried it after converting it into a vdi file since his site is hosting a vmdk file. Oh Well.

Using qemu-img to Convert Chrome OS Zero for VM

Daniel Cawrey — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:27:35 +0000

A reader has just submitted to me:

“Basically, you need to create a generic 32-bit Linux virtual machine in VMware. Just make sure the hard disc is set to use IDE and not SCSI. Then you need to use qemu-img to convert the Chrome OS disk image into a vmdk with the following syntax:

CODE: SELECT ALL: qemu-img convert -f raw chromeos.img -O vmdk chromeos.vmdk

After, that, just replace the virtual hard disk VMware created with the Chrome OS vmdk, and you should be good to go.”

Interview: Chrome OS Zero’s Hexxeh

Daniel Cawrey — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:51:09 +0000

From Chrome OS Diet to Cherry and now the latest, Zero, Hexxeh has been the primary source for Chrome OS build releases ever since Google released the Chromium code to the masses in November. They’ve been popular mostly because they work with a lot of existing hardware, plus the builds are small enough to fit on any USB drive. We got a chance to ask some questions of Hexxeh, who just released Chrome OS Zero a few days ago and talks about how he got started, future job prospects and some features in his latest version.

Tell us about yourself.

Well I’m a UK college student doing AS levels, planning on doing Computer Science at uni. I do web development work here and there, worked a few cool projects. I’d say Chromium OS is one of the most interesting yet, though.

Why did you get you involved in Chrome OS?

I first heard about ChromeOS mid-2009 when the rumours were flying around about an OS from Google. When they made the announcement in November, I just saw it and thought “that looks like it’d be cool to play with”. So I downloaded a copy that night, a couple of hours and a bit of tinkering later, I had it running on my netbook, and I was happy with it. I decided to share it with a few friends who wanted to play around too, and they liked it, and shared it around. So then I just created a site to share it on, I didn’t really have any intention of keeping it up to date, it was just something fun to toy around with for a bit. But then a few tech news sites made posts about it. This killed my small home server stone dead. It was clear people wanted more. So I released Chromium OS Diet, and the same happened again. It just went from there really, two versions later we’re at Zero and I’ve no intention of stopping yet, still got lots of ideas for new features and improvements.

Has the Google Chromium team been helpful when you have had problems come up?

Yeah, they have Google Groups where you can ask questions and it’s proved really useful, it tends to be the case that if I hit a problem, someone else had to and there was a fix. Where there wasn’t, I could ask and many people would come to the rescue and help me out. All in all, they’ve been great.

Are you getting a lot of support from the open-source community? In what ways have they helped you develop this project?

Many an open-source developer has offered to help out with various things, mirroring of the files, supporting the build server by buying shares of it as VPSes and so on. The #linux and #chromium-os IRC (freenode) channels have been a great source of information too.

How much time do you spend working on this?

Too long, haha! When I get down to working on it, I’ll spend all night getting it to work, I don’t like leaving it until it works or it’s 6AM. This gets especially difficult when combined with college. But it’s totally worth it, I love reading the responses from people who’ve tried it out.

What are your goals for working on Chrome OS? There must be something that drives you to do this.

Long term goals are vastly improved hardware support. Obviously, we’ll follow the main Chromium OS source tree too, so any improvements made there will flow downstream to my builds. I hear stuff in the pipeline includes 3G modem support, multi-language support and a new login UI. Anyone interested can check out the main Chromium OS wiki, much of the stuff there will make it’s way into the open-source builds. I like to think I might be building myself the possibility of working with Google is in the cards too, but we’ll have to see about that.

What do you think are the best new features of Chrome OS Zero?

The speed increases are one of the biggest things for most people. Personally, I’m a fan of the new artwork that was added, gives the build amore unique feel and makes it indentifiable against any others. While the update system didn’t ship with Zero, it will be able to be installed separately as a feature, that’s the big one for me. Right now, if I want to release even the tiniest of updates, that means a full new build. There is a lot of work that goes into the build, and it can take a very long time to get it ready to download. The faster I can get the new stuff out to people and get feedback, the better.

Can you talk about how the auto-update capability works in Chrome OS Zero?

It’s pretty simple actually, the way I’ve designed it is so that it downloads a shell script from my server along with a payload archive, and simply executes the script so that the update is installed. After a reboot, anything changed should be available. You should get an pop-up message upon login if an update is available, with an option to install it or ignore it. There are a couple limitations, mostly the amount of disk space allocated by the image. If it becomes a problem I’ll either have to try and trim more out of the OS or just publish a larger build. I’m hoping this will please the people who’ve been asking about fixing the problem where they lose their settings upon re-imaging a new version. The biggest potential issue is that I make a change breaks something for someone else. I could maintain revert scripts, but I dunno, I think it’d be better for everyone if they just reported problems when they arise and I’ll try and get on it asap. Hopefully people can understand it’s not exactly easy to implement something like this. Updates won’t be forced, but I can’t really support old versions, so it’s best to keep up. Hopefully this’ll please those with slower connections and low download limits too, downloading an update is far less expensive in terms of bandwidth than a full new image. You will, however, need to do full updates now and then to get the latest Chromium OS code, this is very difficult to do in an update cleanly.

What’s up with Flash? Is it Adobe or what?

Heh, the amount of people who’ve asked me about this! Was a case of bad luck really, I just happened to check out the code for Chromium at a point when there were problems with Flash, they were fixed very shortly after but I’d already started the build process and didn’t know. Hoping to push a hotfix out for this via the update system beta soon, along with a fix for Bookmark Sync.

Lastly, can you talk about what’s in store in the future for you?

I don’t know yet, but I’m pretty excited to find out myself. There was talk of the possibility of something happening with a couple companies, but we’ll see how it pans out. I’ll let you know how I get on, heh.

First Look: Chrome OS Zero

Daniel Cawrey — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:48:52 +0000

Well, I’ve had the chance to load up the old USB drive with Zero and take it for a spin. In fact, I’m writing this post with Zero right now. I have to say that there is a lot more polish to this version compared to previous builds. In the past I noticed that there seemed to be slight glitches here and there within the interface, especially in the navigational bar at the top. However, these types of issues are to be expected since this was a part of a very early version of the operating system – although they now appear to be gone.

The load time for Zero is very fast – seven seconds to login at my count. Once logged in with the facepunch/facepunch combo, I quickly connected to my wireless internet. I was able to surf around with ease, and felt like I could really get used to this on a day-to-day basis. One problem is taking screenshots and the handling of image files, however.

In the top right, it appears that the options menu to the far right where you can see your machine’s battery status and wireless connection has been removed, and that’s probably because you can access the OS’s preferences from the wrench icon – this was probably changed to reflect how the Chrome browser is set up.

Extensions are a big deal to Chromium, and anyone who uses the Chrome browser would agree with this fact. That’s why the have been added to this version of Chrome OS. Of course, being the intrepid blogger I attempted to take screenshots of Zero with the Aviary extension tool which allows you to take screens in the Chrome browser. Unfortunately I received a rather polite error stating that Flash was just not going to cooperate with me.

I’m not sure what the issue is with Flash yet, but I’ve pos ed my question at the Chromium Group to see if I get an answer. I did a quick search over there and it looks like there is an issue with it. Since Fl ash has been reported as a potential security risk perhaps early builds are going to go without it until regular users start adopting the OS.

I’m not sure how how automatic updates work in Zero, but according to Hexxeh’s site this is a new feature in this build. I think it’s a great idea since that will be how all updates are delivered in the future for Chromium.

Chrome OS Zero Released

Daniel Cawrey — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:19:22 +0000

A new build of Chrome OS by Hexxeh wa s released today under the moniker Chrome OS Zero. After several false starts with expectations of a release last week (due to an MBR problem), we finally see a new and updated version of Chrome OS that promises to be more polished and even easier to use than past iterations. This release is based off of a newer Chromium OS code version from Google and offers some new features, which among other things includes new artwork.

There is also:

Additional Broadcom wireless support
Limited multi-language capabilities
Extension support
Reduced file size
Speed improvements

The most important new capability is probably extension support. Plus the new designs on Hexxeh’s website look pretty cool.

You can load this from USB so you can boot your PC from a USB drive, and then you can hit the power button on your machine to restart whenever you want to return to your normal OS. There are instructions on how do this right here.

We’ll give it a try and write up a review in a bit.