Google Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

corkie

Google Releasing the Chromium OS open source project
11/19/2009 10:31:00 AM
In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

A stripped down version of linux, running the chrome browser. It will totally depend on Cloud resources with nothing stored on hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw

Naikon

corkie wrote: »

It will totally depend on Cloud resources

Not no good.

Good thing they decided not to reinvent the wheel by replacing Xorg.
Should be interesting to see how it pans out next year.

Sheeps

Interesting idea. If it actually takes off, I wonder what kind of affect this will have on the internet, considering there was a scare that bit torrent was breaking the internet because of the amount of bandwidth people were using.

bman

So does this mean Googles new OS is totally open source? As in nothing hidden?

I remember a while ago hearing people complaining that Google were going to be building their own proprietary code to run on top of Linux and keeping as much as possible proprietary. Has this changed? Was it ever the case?

Kinetic^

Wanted to try this out virtually last night but 9.10 would not play ball. Will try 9.04.

eddhorse

Nice Pic Kinetic....Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

Anyways, having trouble logging into the google chrome OS vmware image.

Anyone else try it?

Tillotson

Yea, trying it out in virtualbox now. It boots fast but it seems to take a good while to start up the network. Maybe I should change virtualbox's network settings.

It really is just a browser. Kinda uninteresting. It doesn't boot that much faster than Haiku which I used on an old laptop for a while.

eddhorse

I must be having problems with NAT or Bridged then, i get a login failure message ! Damn

Orion

looks interesting - it would be ideal for netbooks. Link me the download so I can VirtualBox it over the weekend.

croo

Sounds like Larry Elliison's net machine or whatever he called it... and in a way an extension of xterminals idea before that. As a device I guess it would be more in line with what 80% of home users need... i say home because I'm not sure the corp. world would like you putting all those valuable contact details on the web.

Also, to a great extent most of todays phones precisely this already!

If I have the choice of a chrome machine that does all web stuff or a general system that does that plus other stuff I might just need unless the chrome machine is a lot cheaper I can see people going with the full system "just in case"... even if they really will probably never need or use it.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

FFS, blindly torrented an iso there, someone had stuck a google logo on a SUSE live distro.

Tillotson

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/457451/ide.vmdk.torrent
It's well seeded, you should be able to download at full speed.

eddhorse

Id be slightly worried about getting your username and password hijacked.

Video about security here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9WVmNfgjtQ

Eliot Rosewater

Imagine the scene: Im in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, about to meet my death at the hands of a pack a ravenous starving tigers, and wanting only to type out a brief farewell and will to family and friends, when I reach for my laptop, tear it open, turn it on, wait ... oh sheeeeet! No Internet connection - no document writer, what will I ...

*gobble gobble gobble*



But seriously, in the full (1 hour 20 minutes) talk on Chome OS the presenter says they are "making the laptop yours." Really, isnt Chrome OS about going the exact opposite way - making the laptop not yours?! Interesting choice of catchphrase...

This may be good for netbooks, but I dont think it will go much further. I dont fancy having to have Internet connection to use basic functionality such as word processing. And as was touched upon above there will always be the "what if" doubt of wanting to have desktop apps.

Dartz

So, all our applications and stuff will be stored online in one big computer far away, and we'll use little low-powered computers over a high bandwith conection to run them. That's cloud-computing, right?

It's been done before.

It sucks when you have no network... or a **** one

Is this really what it is? I don't that I'd like having my data and applications stored on a remote server. What if I'm on a train with no internet connection and want to do some work? (as I often do)

BopNiblets

I don't get the point of cloud computing except for kiosk browsing stuff, you still have to have an OS with a browser on your laptop or PC in order to get to onto your Chrome OS... if anything this makes the whole thing MORE time consuming:
Turn on laptop, wait for BIOS, wait for login, wait for browser to open, wait for Chrome OS to open, wait for Chrome browser to open...
There's 2 more steps you're waiting for!

Eliot Rosewater

BopNiblets wrote: »

I don't get the point of cloud computing except for kiosk browsing stuff, you still have to have an OS with a browser on your laptop or PC in order to get to onto your Chrome OS... if anything this makes the whole thing MORE time consuming:

No you see Chrome OS is your Operating System! One of the advantages is its fast loading time - something like 10 seconds. So your Operating System is effectively just a very modern (and fast) web browser.

However, can all the simple tasks one wants to do be achieved through a web browser? Surely if one wants to add images to a document you are restricted by upload speeds (mines only 10kb/s :eek: - and my camera takes 4mb files!). Cant see it working in the real world, unless your guaranteed really fast interweb all the time.

And the whole idea is that you can have different computers using your same cloud so you can have the same things going on in different places. But given that this OS is targeted at netbooks, designed from the word go to be portable, isnt it just a little self-defeating?

Im open to correction here, but I just cant see how your whole computer would be based on cloud computing.

BopNiblets

Is it similar to the Splashtop thing I heard about a few months ago? Cos that seemed pretty nifty.
Where is ChromeOS installed, HD or in the BIOS?

BopNiblets

BopNiblets wrote: »

Is it similar to the Splashtop thing I heard about a few months ago? Cos that seemed pretty nifty.
Where is ChromeOS installed, HD or in the BIOS?

I've seen Splashtop in the form of Asus ExpressGate. It's basically just a browser and Skype client which can load even before the BIOS, though it's still on the hard disk.

Khannie

The machine still has an OS from what I picked up in that security video. It's basically just another linux distro with chrome on top and some othe rminor differences, right?

ethernet

That sounds about right, Khannie. Set it up in a VM earlier and set the guest OS as Linux to get things working, as per a good few guides online. Presumably it's seriously pruned down in terms of hardware support and extraneous system services to get the super short boot time (~5-7 seconds in two different VMs: one on a P4, other on a C2D).

Nothing overly exciting about it just yet. Odd not being able to minimise a window! Big focus on social networking going on the icons for Facebook, Twitter and the like in the main menu.

Herbal Deity

I think it's an awesome concept and that people are underestimating it.

Yes, the lack of reliable, fast, ubiquotus internet is a problem, but it doesn't stop the idea being awesome. In the future we might see laptops come out with tiny/no hard drives and minimal processing power, with no loss of performance.

Tom Dunne

Herbal Deity wrote: »

Yes, the lack of reliable, fast, ubiquotus internet is a problem, but it doesn't stop the idea being awesome. In the future we might see laptops come out with tiny/no hard drives and minimal processing power, with no loss of performance.

You have basically described an X-terminal from 10 years ago.

Ah, the joys of TFTP and getting the damn things to boot properly.

But I think there is a market for Chrome OS - specifically the home/office based user for whom mobility is not an issue. Everything is done on the server, the end-user unit is basically a dumb terminal with limited processing power and a graphical user interface.

Herbal Deity

Tom Dunne wrote: »

You have basically described an X-terminal from 10 years ago.

Pretty much. It is quite a similar idea.

Naikon

Tom Dunne wrote: »

You have basically described an X-terminal from 10 years ago.

Ah, the joys of TFTP and getting the damn things to boot properly.

But I think there is a market for Chrome OS - specifically the home/office based user for whom mobility is not an issue. Everything is done on the server, the end-user unit is basically a dumb terminal with limited processing power and a graphical user interface.

XDMCP has enabled remote sessions for dumb terminals since 1989 afaik:cool:
Horribly insecure unless you are running a trusted network, or if you tunnel the connection over say ssh as required.