thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Resources

Video: O2 Joggler Running Chrome

Posted on 17. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

We posted a video earlier this week of Hexxeh using Chrome OS Flow on a tablet. The tablet in question is called the O2 Joggler, a multimedia tablet that comes at a very low cost – around $80. The system specifications are less than a typical netbook, and it doesn’t come with a battery, so it has to be plugged in all the time.

Here is a more complete video of an O2 Joggler running Ubuntu and Chrome browser with the ChromeTouch extension.

Hexxeh Shows off Touch on a Chrome OS Tablet

Posted on 16. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

A few days ago Hexxeh showed off his newest Chromium project, which is porting his Chrome OS Flow build over to a tablet. Supposedly the device used is an O2 Joggler. Today, he’s posted an early version that is working with touch.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a Chrome OS tablet.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/9/10

Posted on 09. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

The New York Times is running a profile about those who are downloading and using Chrome OS, complete with a bit about our pal Hexxeh.

Some people are concerned that Google is getting too big, like former journalist turned Consumer Watchdog advocate John Simpson.

Is Apple developing their own alternative to Flash?

Although some people don’t like the recent changes that have been made to Google Search, there will be no option to revert to the classic version.

Google has launched the Google Analytics Application Gallery where developers can submit their own tools for Google Analytics.

Where to Download Chrome OS

Posted on 07. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/2/10

Posted on 02. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Hexxeh, the UK student who has released his variation of Chrome OS builds, plans on taking applications to another level with his next release.

The (unofficial) Google Chrome Browser blog has a tutorial on how to disable geolocation within Chrome.

Network World has a write-up remarking about the flurry of security updates that went out for Chrome browser in the month of April.

The Google Code blog has announced the release of Google Web Elements, which integrates some of Google’s services into web pages.

The Difference Between Chrome OS and Chrome OS Flow

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

I get asked fairly often questions pertaining to Chrome OS. Actually this may surprise you, but I enjoy talking about it. I know for many this whole Chrome OS thing is a bit confusing. So let me take this post to make clear what is going on. One of the big issues I hear about is the difference between Chrome OS and Chrome OS Flow. For those who have not been paying attention here is the real lowdown.

Google is planning on releasing an official Chrome operating system towards the end of 2010. This will be a portable computerof some sort, like a tablet or netbook that is branded as a Google product that comes loaded with Chrome OS. For the time being, all we have is what is known as Google’s open source Chromium OS project. You can visit the official site here, it has documentation and videos discussing ideas and possible specs for both the hardware and software.

Chrome OS Flow was developed by a UK student named Hexxeh. He took the open source Chromium OS code found on the Chromium project resources site and created his own packaged “build” to work with most netbook hardware that you can put on a USB stick or load as a VM image. Flow is a good representation of what the commerical Chrome OS will be like, and that is why there is some talk about it. If you’re interested in trying it out, I suggest you head over to his site.

There are others who have created their own builds, most notably a 64-bit version and one that has been created by the Dell Linux team. But so far Flow appears to be the best representation of what to expect later on this year.

Any other questions? Comment or contact me.

We May See a Chrome OS Netbook Mid-2010, But Not For Sale

Posted on 25. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

There has been a lot of speculation that there will be a Chrome OS netbook that will be available from Acer in the middle of this year, which would only be about four months away. I’m not sure where this kind of information is coming from, but I think that this was something that was leaked by an insider to keep Acer’s name in the news about Chrome OS. Ther reality is that yes, we will probably see something from Acer in mid-2010, but it won’t be something that we as consumers will be able to buy yet.

That’s because one of the biggest computer shows, Computex, will be convientley showing off the wares of many manufacturers in early June. Doesn’t that sound like mid-2010 to you? Plus, Computex is held in Taipei, Tawian. That means that major companies such as Asus, MSI and of Acer will be there, and they will probably be showing finished products that run on Chromium builds.

Also, in late May, Google will hold its developer conference, dubbed Google I/O. A look at the sessions that will be held has some Chrome OS topics  scheduled. There may be some news that comes out of the conference, most likely of which will be an announcement of a uniform programming language for use across Google’s platforms to help streamline development when the operating system is actually released. This will most likely be of Google’s own experimental language, called Go.

Look, anyone that has taken a look at the latest builds of Chromium by running Hexxeh’s Flow would know that while the OS is progressing, there is still some development that still needs to be completed before Google is going to give the green light for manufacturers to sell devices with this platform. While I’m sure they want to get something out that competes with Apple’s iPad soon, rushing the development cycle for this is not going to create a lasting impression on users if the product is not ready.

So if you’re in such a hurry, Acer, why don’t you advertise the fact that you have the Windows 7/Android AOD250 netbook on the market? Sure, it’s not a tablet. But it’s probably a more polished product that what Chrome OS can offer consumers over the next six months:

So expect to see some interesting hardware developments by June, but don’t expect to see something that you can actually purchase until the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Review: Chrome OS Flow

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

I’ve finally gotten Chrome OS Flow downloaded, imaged to a USB stick and running on a machine. It took some time, as when I started the download yesterday morning I came back later in the day only to find that less than half of the archive for the build had been downloaded before it petered out. Hexxeh noted this in his Twitter account, so this must be a widespread outage that occurred. Once I finally got the download finished in the wee hours, I couldn’t get it to run on any of my machines – probably because I wasn’t actually awake anymore.

The best part of this new version that I found was that it now can store your wireless settings. That’s helpful, because now you can jump right into whatever you need to do once you get logged in. In the past, you would get some ugly “cannot connect” pages every boot, but once you configure your network from the upper right hand corner for the first time, it is good to go.

For whatever reason, I was only able to use the facepunch/facepunch login to get into Flow. Attempting to use my own Google account would not work. Thanks to a commenter, I found out that a quirk to Flow requires me to login using a wired connection using my account, and then after that it is cached. Still dealing with beta, and that’s how it goes.

Flash is working on this one, and the sound is working too. The power indicator is also functional, although I never really had an issue with it in past builds. I busted out some tunes on Lala, and I was excited. This is starting to look like something I could use on one of my machines on a regular basis. YouTube videos ran fine, and I think Hexxeh had to spend quite a bit of time getting the Nvidia hardware to work correctly for Flow in order to get codecs to run.

I didn’t see any elements of customizable windows for the applications that had been previewed via a screenshot at first just a week ago. Hexxeh tossed a comment on this post saying it does work, by clicking on the Chromium logo in the upper left and it would pop up. It does work now, and you can get access to many web apps that are already out there. I had some problems moving icons around, but I’m still happy with the fact that these pseudo-bookmarks work to get me to places like Facebook, Google Docs and status updates for Flow.

There are added network preferences in the options menu, among a few other tidbits that have been changed. However, I don’t want to write too much, as this is still an early release and these things are subject to change. I know Hexxeh spent a lot of time trying to get this working, and he is planning on using his new auto-update system to work out any bugs and system changes that there may be. So go ahead and download this, try it out. The resources are on Hexxeh’s site, and include a bug tracker, so check it out right here.

UPDATE: I have modified this article based on the comments below. Feel free to offer your own. I have also found that Extensions do not work.

2ND UPDATE: Extensions do work, you have to hit Enter through the menus when asked if you want to install the extension instead of using your mouse. Its kind of quirky, but at least they are working.

Chrome OS Flow Brings Apps to the Forefront

Posted on 09. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Since the first release of the Chromium Project’s source code to the public back in November, a UK student who goes by the name Hexxeh has been steadily releasing custom builds. Unlike the Chromium code updates that are regularly put out by Google, this is a better packaged version for public consumption. The builds are small enough to pop onto a USB drive, boot up on whatever computing device that is laying around, and is quick to start up and utilize. It’s been the best early look users have had to see what Chrome OS will be able to do once it reaches a commercial stage later this year.

Recently, Hexxeh has been posting some hints that his newest version, Chrome OS Flow, could be the best release yet for mainstream purposes. The focus on this time, now that a lot of hardware has been tested and is supported in his builds, is to focus on the application side of the operating system. And that’s not a bad idea since many wonder if Chrome OS will be able to function as a regular personal computing replacement, or just another gadget that is stacked up for our personal information disposal.

A new way of constructing the builds, which Hexxeh has dubbed ReFlow, will also be introduced. This will allow for more time to be spent on actually testing and updating Flow as opposed to using up a lot of time creating the build itself.

Here is a screenshot Hexxeh posted on Twitter recently that shows Flow’s focus towards making web applications easy to use in Chrome with a configurable Javascript menu:

Expect Flow to require a 2 GB USB Stick, have auto-update for patches and updates as well as is expected to be released on February 12.

Some other new features include user interface changes in addition to the aforementioned applications menus that are customizable and fixes for issues that plagued last release (Chrome OS Zero) for sound, Flash and Bookmark Sync. Also, if you have an application that you want to have included in the Flow directory, you can find more about submitting it to Hexxeh right here.

Update: Apparently there has been problems for Hexxeh getting Flow released, as the Chromium project has changed some features. We’ll be posting when Flow comes out.

Chrome OS Zero VM Image Available

Posted on 19. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

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

Posted on 17. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

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

Posted on 14. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

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

Posted on 12. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

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 posed 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 Flash 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

Posted on 11. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

A new build of Chrome OS by Hexxeh was 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.