Yesterday, Google officially announced their new Chrome OS and explained what it will be when it's released.  They also published the source code to allow developers and other interested parties to take a peek.  I'm one of those "other interested parties."

The Setup

I didn't build the OS from source myself, but downloaded a pre-compiled VMWare image.  Then, using CloneVDI, I converted it to a VirtualBox virtual hard disk.  I just created a new Virtual Machine for Linux and added the .vdi.  Done!

The Tour

First, you're presented with a logon screen.  My first thought was "uhhh.... now what?  I didn't create an account".  Then I remembered: "This is a Google product.  Try your Google login."  And whadayano?  It worked!

Login Screen

I don't know why it was off-center like that.  It came up like that every time for me.

The first place I went to after logging in was a button at the top left that looked like a Chrome logo.  That gave me this page:

Google Short Links

I don't know what "Google Short Links" is, but it wouldn't let me login with my regular username/password here.

I wanted to see what I was working with, so I went to the "About" dialog.

About

It's using Chromium 4.0.253.0 (32535).

Next, I went to the options menu.

Options Menu

The first page provides you with some time and touchpad settings.

Options Dialog

One setting that would be nice to have?  Screen resolution.  I couldn't find any place to change that, and the 800x600 default resolution feels incredibly confining.  I found the bottom of the Basics tab humorous:

Basics Tab

Chromium cannot determine or set the default browser.

...oops.

As for the other two settings pages, they're exactly what we all have in Google Chrome right now.

Let's see... what should I try next?  Oh yeah!  How about my favorite Google service?  Hello Gmail

Revoked Security Certificate

Wait... what?  This happened to me several times.  After refreshing, it usually worked, but it took over 5 refreshes once.  Very annoying.

Once I finally got gmail to show up, I tried to enable offline mode.  Surely this OS has gears built-in, right?  Wrong.  It asked me to install Gears:

Gears

Unfortunately, it's impossible to install Gears.  I learned through this process that currently, it is impossible to open any file in this OS.

Gears Install

Clicking on the downloaded file does nothing.  Clicking the "Open in folder" option from the file's sub-menu... does nothing.  Google will have gears integrated by the time this is released.  They'd be crazy not to.

Conclusion

My thoughts?  Looks like fun.  For how far along it is, the integration with Google services is impressive.  It's definitely very rough right now.  For example: there's no way to tell it to shut down.  That's a pretty glaring oversight.  But obviously, this is an extremely early release which is by no means complete.

Also, speed was an issue.  Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit runs faster in VirtualBox on my machine.  That is not an exaggeration.  In case you're wondering:  My desktop runs on an Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.66Ghz (Q9450) with 8GB of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM and a 10,000RPM boot drive (which also hosted the .vdi file), so the bottleneck was not my machine.

All problems aside, I can't wait to see what the finished product looks like, or how Google's new programming language will fit into it all.

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