Manmohanjit Singh

Google a few days ago announced Google Chrome OS and did a demo of it too. Aside from being a Microsoft fan, today I thought of giving it a run. GDGT today somehow had Chrome OS available for download on their site. It was a pleasure downloading the Virtual Hard Disk compressed into a ZIP archive at 320MB. I had set up Virtual Box and then booted the VMDK file on Virtual Box. It wasn’t much trouble doing so. The base memory was set to 384MB and the Virtual Hard Disk image was only 2.78GB once loaded.

On the first boot, it showed me a log in screen. I had to enter my G-Mail account details to log in. As its a DEV build and is still in a very young stage, it log in screen was somehow not placed properly or maybe its just something to do with my resolution.

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Its a very simple log in screen, just to boot up into the OS, it takes me only 5 seconds, and its not a joke. Most probably the log in screen would be touched up a little bit in other future builds. Maybe a Google Logo on top of the log in form all those other cool effects. For the boot time, as I said it only takes 5 seconds, running on Virtual Box with only 384MB of Memory. I would have to say that its outstanding, after the boot, I just had to key in my details and I’m done.

It takes me straight to the browser and loads Google’s main page. It has the basic Google Chrome(browser) functions and some additional functions to control the OS. Very straight forward, no desktop and just a browser.

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You might have noticed that yellow bar saying that I didn’t shutdown Chrome OS properly and a option to open recovered tabs, well I did reset it without doing it the right way. Its great that it remembers the tabs I opened in the previous session, with this users wouldn’t need to search through their history if this OS ever crashes.

I haven’t got any problems whatsoever with it, it runs fine and smooth. Generally, its just a OS which starts up with a browser. I wouldn’t say that anyone could use this as a full time OS but maybe as a PC in the kitchen or at the bedside. Basically at the area’s where people only uses the internet and not gaming or IM’ing.

Below shows a gallery compilled containing screenshots of this OS.

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Google said that Chrome OS would debut in a year and is intended for netbooks. Chrome OS would only allow browser-based applications to run on it. As of right now it runs on X86 chips but later on it would run on both X86 and ARM chips. There would be other hardware restrictions, as a example only certain wireless cards would be supported. Google is focused to get this OS on netbooks while the other devices are just ’second machines’, as confirmed at the webcast a few days ago by Google VP of product management, Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director, Matthew Papakipos

Note: All photos showed in this post is a older build and the one at the webcast is indeed newer.

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