Google Chrome OS PreviewedGoogle Chrome OS Previewed

When Google announced it was creating its own consumer-oriented operating system based on the Chrome browser, the world gasped. On November 18th, Google gave the world its first peek of Chrome OS -- and this time there were yawns and shrugs among the oohs and aahs.

What the search giant displayed was a combination of Google's already-familiar Chrome browser with a thin Linux underpinning -- an OS designed to do little more than connect to the Web and run Chrome in a heavily protected fashion.

But for new generations of computers users, for whom computing is the Web, Chrome OS may be able to satisfy their inner Goldilocks. Instead of a full-blown desktop / notebook PC or a tiny smartphone, they'll be able to pick up a just-right netbook or tablet PC that won't drain their wallets and Chrome OS will give them everything from YouTube to Yahoo! in a way that they're already familiar with.

Chrome OS won't be ready for about a year, but we're going to take a quick preview tour of the operating system via its publicly-available open source incarnation, known as Chromium OS. This is far removed from the finished product, but enough of the important pieces are in place to give us an idea of what Chrome OS is meant to do.

The Basics

First, some clarifications. What people are downloading from Google and compiling and booting in VMs or on netbooks right now isn't "Chrome OS," strictly speaking. It's Chromium OS, the core open source element for Chrome OS. It doesn't include Google's brand-specific refinements, and it doesn't yet run on its target hardware -- mainly because there isn't any such hardware yet.

This may seem like nitpicking, but it's not. The final, official version will have a level of polish and a degree of integration with its host hardware that Chromium OS does not have by default. For the sake of consistency, we'll be referring to the OS as "Chromium OS" throughout this piece.

There are two ways to obtain Chromium OS. The first is to download the source code and build it yourself. This isn't a trivial task: the instructions for doing this run to a few pages , and require a running copy of Linux for the build environment.

Most people won't go that route. Instead, they'll turn to third parties that have posted copies of their own builds of the source code online. The folks at GDGT.com built their own virtual disk image of Chromium OS, and GeekLad created his own VirtualBox appliance . It's also possible to convert these images into a USB-bootable image (as GDGT.com has done), so you can try out Chromium OS on any computer that boots from a USB.

Booting And Logging In

The key word is "try." Don't be surprised if you boot Chromium OS on some hardware and are greeted with a black screen. Part of this is because it's still an alpha-stage project; part of it is because you might be using hardware that Chromium OS isn't designed to support (or supports only shakily right now). Virtual machines -- like the aforementioned VirtualBox -- seem to produce the most consistent results, since the environment within the VM is rigorously controlled.

When you first boot Chromium OS, you should see a login screen very quickly. Boot times on Chromium are fast; if you don't see something within ten to fifteen seconds, odds are your hardware is not compatible with the current build. Google maintains a list of hardware with known behaviors , so if you have access to anything on that list you can improve your odds of booting and running by using something documented there.

You can log in one of two ways: with a Google or Gmail account (if you have one), or by using a local login named chromos (blank password). In order for any login other than chromos to work, you need to have network connectivity -- so if you're dubious about the state of your networking on your test hardware, you can always log in with chromos first and check connectivity once you're inside. Note that any login name has "@gmail.com" automatically appended to it; this is normal.

The OS Itself

After logging into Chromium OS, more than one person has said "That's it?" Yes, that's it -- you'll see a browser, one that looks a great deal like Google Chrome as we've come to know it on the PC. And yet, there are a few key things that make all the difference.

The "Simon"-like icon on the top left side of the browser works something like the Start or Windows-logo button on a conventional PC. Click it and you'll be taken to a landing page where many common Web services -- some Google, some third-party -- are available.

This page isn't directly customizable yet, but you can get an idea of how it works by launching some things. Contacts, for instance, pops open a Google Talk window; this little pop-up window format is used for many other on-the-spot functions.

Since the vast majority of what you do in Chromium OS is going to be in a browser, window management is at a minimum. Apart from adding or deleting tabs in the browser itself, there's an Aero Peek / Exposé -like multi-window view which you can fire up by hitting F12. From there you can open entirely new browser windows or switch between them. Also, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del brings up the Task Manager -- no, not the Windows version, but the one you find in Chrome via Shift-Esc and "Stats for nerds" (i.e., about:memory).

The top-right corner of the browser holds a few additional controls: a clock, a power-management / battery indicator, a network status indicator, and a drop-down menu that's the same as the "wrench" icon in Chrome. From there you can access many of the same settings you'd expect to find in Chrome as well, although they are far from the full range of options available in the system. For that, you'll need to really dig under the hood.

The Console

The command-line console is where Chromium OS's Linux underpinnings become clear. Press Ctrl-Alt-T and you'll be greeted with a text-only command line, into which you can type any number of common Linux commands.

Note that a lot of things have been stripped down or tossed out entirely, so some commands might not work as expected, or at all. In some ways the Linux substrate for Chromium OS is akin to the mini-Linux plus BusyBox found in hardware devices like routers: there's only what's needed to run the system and no more than that.

Most every command must be run with administrator or root privileges to be effective. You'll need to use the Linux sudo command to make this happen. You'll also need the admin password to run sudo, which might vary from build to build. In the Geeklad VirtualBox build, the admin password is just password; in many other builds, the admin password is chromos.

The changes that can be made under the hood right now depend entirely on how much spelunking you're willing to perform. On some builds, it's possible to use the xrandr command to change the display size -- handy if Chromium OS is stuck at a resolution you know is a good deal smaller than what your display hardware is capable of. Many things, however, are manifestly not possible right now: adding packages to a running system, for instance. At this stage it only seems possible to do that by adding said packages to the system-image build process.

You might have noticed by now that Chromium OS has no obvious way to turn things off. Normally, the only power button Chromium OS listens for activity from is the power button of the device it's running on. If you're using VirtualBox, though, you can use the "ACPI Shutdown" command to tell the system to turn off cleanly. A third way, which works in all the environments I tried, is to issue the console command sudo shutdown -P now. (The admin password is required.)

After The First Peek

Now that we've had our first good long look and the initial excitement has died down a little, what's really important about Chrome OS, and Chromium OS?

The first thing that's clear is how Google is forcibly distinguishing Chrome OS from a conventional desktop operating system, for better or worse. This is not and probably never will be a replacement for a desktop, but an adjunct -- in the same way that, for instance, that the iPhone is not a replacement for a full-blown Mac desktop, but a complement to it. (Chrome OS is only meant to run on Google-approved devices, so the parallel to the iPhone has more than one dimension.)

Since the vast majority of computer users do at least some degree of their computing in the context of the Web, most stand to get something useful out of Chrome OS. They may not even have to make that deep a commitment to it for Chrome OS to be successful on its own terms.

Another thing that is immediately clear is how Chrome OS and Chromium OS will exist side-by-side, and thrive on each other's development. The former will be a product, sporting polish (and branding) provided by Google and its associated hardware partners. (And, from the look of it, some software partners as well -- e.g., Canonical.) The latter will be a project, a common baseline from which the finished work is derived -- but also a pool from which could be made any number of derivative works or "re-spins."

How will this affect the branding of the product? It is, after all, the hardware partnerships that will help define how Chrome OS is presented to the end user. There's nothing to stop someone from installing Chromium OS on their current netbook or notebook -- but such users are not the intended market, and Google is not getting bent out of shape about that. If anything, it's a win for them: the more people running Chrome(ium) OS, in any form, the better.

A third, and extremely major part of the whole package, is how offline access is going to be handled in the finished product. It's not clear whether that's going to be handled by things in the base package, or by components which are primarily Google-branded, and not available as Chromium OS (as opposed to Chrome OS) pieces. Right now little, if any, of this plumbing exists, and that alone is a good reflection of the very alpha state of the system. If Google leaves too many of the key parts of the Chrome OS experience to be filled in by its nascent developer community, that will clash badly with its plans for delivering a solid end-user experience.

The real test of Chrome OS's draw will come when users are invited to pay money to experience the product at its best. If its best turns out to be little better than what people can experience for nothing on their own hardware, then it will remain as a niche within a niche. It'll be worth keeping an eye on both Chrome OS and Chromium OS in the months to come, if only to see how the project and the product both merge and diverge.

For Further Reading

Google Chrome OS: Web Platform To Rule Them All

Google Chrome OS: Vaporware Or Victory?

Google Chrome OS Unveiled: Nothing But The Web

Google's Chrome OS Threatens Linux, Is Good For Microsoft