A happy accident for me tonight. A misclick while trying to install the Jolicloud Live iso on a USB key left me booting my netbook into Google’s ChromeOS. I was amazed that it actually worked!
From power on to log-in to Web was, literally, seconds.
Here is a quick and dirty review.
You log in with your gmail account info.
You are then presented with, well, a Chrome browser window with two tabs open: gMail and gCal.
There is a weird Chrome icon just to the left of the gMail tab.
This is where your “installed” apps are displayed:
gMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail (which is balls out nice of Google to include), gCal, Google Reader, Google Docs
YouTube, PicasaWeb, Hulu, Lala (?!?!?!), Pandora
Contacts, Calculator, To-do, Calendar Panel
Books, Chess, Facecrack, Twitter, Get more… which is greyed out.
In the upper right is a digital clock (10:41p), battery status, network settings (turning on Wifi on my eeePC 901 dumped me back to the login screen, but my session remained running…with wifi still disabled), and one that offers just a buttload of options.
Notables are:
New Incognito Window (for surfing pr0ns)
Extensions (which is currently only accepting uploads from registered devs)
Options
Options gives you very basic control of the box. Mouse speed, network proxy, etc.
And that is about it. It is about as stripped down an OS as I have ever seen. Well, maybe Gentoo Netboot can claim less, but that is hardly usable. From power-on to posting to SBF was about 15 seconds. You ain’t doing that with Gentoo Netboot!
I’m thinking I might take it for a ride into werk tomorrow and see if it will last a full day.
I’ve been testing a bunch of netbook operating systems over the past couple days. Some are decent, some have miles still to go. I really want to see Jolicloud in action, but right now I am pretty happy with ChromeOS…which is still an alpha!
Good morning from Chrome at werk.
I am tethered up as the werk wampa blocks gmail, etc.
One thing that I see is missing is Bluetooth support, but I am not shocked.
Again, everything is zippy, even running over my phone.
A few minor hiccups, but nothing really major to report.
I use this machine to surf the Web.
Hello, ChromeOS!
The iso file is 600MB and I have it extracted to an 8GB thumb drive.
I think I saw an install guide for actually putting it on the SSD of the eeePC.
Of all the netbook OSs I've seen so far, this one is definitely Best in Show.
Simple, elegant and FAST.
In the parent post, there are a bunch of ?!?!?!?!?! marks after Lala. I did not know what Lala was last week. Now it is part of Apple.
http://gizmodo.com/5421547/why-apple-paid-millions-for-a-music-streaming-site-youve-never-heard-of