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Chrome OS (or is it Chromium?) is Google’s web browser operating system – it’s a linux distribution that starts X, and then runs a version of the Chrome web browser which functions as both the only available application and only window manager. The Chrome web browser basically becomes your entire operating environment.

With the advance of Web 2.0 technologies, an increasing number of applications are being written to run in the browser. One day an entirely browser-based OS could potentially even replace Windows. One day all our data and applications may exist in the cloud and every other device we use is simply a browser terminal.. That said, people have been trying to make thin-client systems work for quite a while and it has yet to see any real success. The version of Chromium that I’m looking at is a pre-release developer preview (version 0.4.22.8).

You can now download Chrome OS virtual hard disk images for VMWare and VirtualBox here – this allows you to run it on a virtual machine and play with it without having to install it over the top of your existing OS. I picked VirtualBox because it’s free and works fairly well, VMWare works slightly better but it’s not free (a free trial is available though which might be all you need).

I set up VirtualBox on my Windows Vista laptop and set up a Virtual Machine with 512mb of RAM and the operating system type set to Linux/Ubuntu. I first tried the VirtualBox chrome-os-v0.4.22.8-gdgt.vdi image file (this is the one that it says is for VirtualBox) but this just presented with a black screen that stayed black forever. I then tried chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk which is the VMWare image – this worked, so for some reason with this particular build you have to use the VMWare image even in VirtualBox.

Here’s the first thing you see when it boots (and it seems to boot fairly quickly):

Chromium OS Login Screen

You can login with any Google ID – I used the same account I use to view the Google Analytics for this site. The OS seems to just assume it’s connected to a network and can get an IP address via DHCP, I haven’t tested what it does if you disable the network connection in VirtualBox.

Here’s the first thing you see after you login:

Chrome OS Startup Screen

This is what you get if you click on the tab in the top left corner with the Chrome icon on it, you can also see I’ve got an incognito tab open as well:

Chrome OS Welcome to Google

The screenshot below shows what happens when you click on the icon in the top right corner of the screen – the other two icons bring up smaller menus for battery life and network connectivity. At this stage is doesn’t look like you get much control over how the network is set up, but I’m sure that’ll come in later versions.

Chrome Top Right Corner Menu

Here’s what comes up if you click “About Chromium”:

Chromium About Dialog

When you click on ‘Options’, you’re presented with these tabs:

Chrome Under the Hood

It’s at this point that you realise quite how basic Chrome OS really is – it is just an X server running Chrome and nothing else. The really basic tabbed configuration screen you see above looks to be written in GTK and they haven’t even bothered to put a GTK theme on it yet.

With a lot more work on the user interface, Chrome OS could be a viable alternative platform for a lot of people, but it’s a long way off that goal – there’s no indication of whether your preferences are being stored locally, or in the “Google” cloud – similarly, are downloaded files going to my local machine or the cloud? I should be able to choose. And this horrible grey GTK theme should’ve been one of the first things to go:

Chromium OS Config Dialog

I could find no way to change the screen resolution or keyboard layout which made it pretty frustrating to be confined to a tiny window with a US keyboard layout.

You can skin Chrome OS with normal Chrome skins so you can have it in a variety of revolting colours (many of which make the Chrome OS icons in the top right corner of the screen almost invisible). However, changing the Chrome theme has no effect on the GTK theme, so the menus and dialogs remain grey:

Chrome OS Themes

Because the Chrome browser looked so good right from its early betas, I was kinda expecting a bit more from Chrome OS. Chrome OS has been made available to the public way before it’s anywhere close to being a usable platform – they don’t even seem to have properly decided on a name for it yet; within the OS it’s called Chromium, but the filenames of the virtual images I downloaded call it Chrome OS. Whatever it’s called, you can see they’re heading in the right kind of direction but there’s huge amounts of work still to be done before it’ll start seeing mass-adoption.

So there you have it – my conclusion is that it looks promising and we may even have a serious contender to Windows one day, but that day is still quite a long way off.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 8:09 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.