How to try out Google Chrome OS for yourself | Hacker News Reader

How to try out Google Chrome OS for yourself

techcrunch.com

49 pointsjedwhite20 comments

What you guys think about the whole idea of Chrome OS? I am starting to see the advantage in two areas:

1) ultracheap internet devices. I would immediately pay up to $150 to have a tablet which I can switch on and instantly (7 seconds) have browser there.

2) I will see the same desktop from everywhere.

But, what will Microsoft do? My guess is that they will wait a bit to see how will it take of, and if it will gain some market share, they can easily copy the whole idea and come up with something like "Windows 8 Light", or "Windows Silverlight". They could remove some parts of Windows 7, leaving just the kernel, part of .NET, Silverlight support and IE. Then they can add some online support, and we will have Chrome OS alternative, but with a possibility to run native windows app.

Microsoft already have something close to the kernel only product you propose that they create in response to Chrome OS - Microsft Server 2008 Server Core.

I don't think that it can start in 7 seconds - and that's without having .Net, Silverlight and IE support.

If Chrome OS does what it claims to do, I will install it without hesitation on my parents, inlaws, and grandparents computers.

As far as I can tell, they don't use their computers for anything more than facebook, forwarding patriotic emails, and clicking on malware links.

It would certainly make my job as unofficial family sysadmin a lot easier.

I am concerned by the revelation that all the program and user data will be held on the Google servers. Sure, it makes for a very secure back-up and the speed it will achieve on smaller machines will be astounding, but do I need one company to have ownership of all my data/information?

Can someone reassure me?

Yeah - the bits most people create are hardly worth the platters they sit on. Chrome OS is for them. The people whose entire online existence consists of forwarded emails and flash games.

Perhaps they could incorporate some homomorphic encryption so that your data can be processed in the cloud without it being readable.

Obliviously computing over encrypted data has a lot of potential, but there are still many technical barriers to overcome before it's practical on a large scale.

If you're talking about Gentry's fully homomorphic encryption, that's not going to be used in practice any time soon.

that's "because they are not evil", you know... People who are supporting Chrome cite they won't be 'locked in to Windows' as a key point, but they don't realize that the lock-in, in this case, will be A LOT worse..

How to try out Chrome OS for yourself:

1. Install Ubuntu

2. Build Chromium and run it full-screen

3. Use various Google apps (mail, docs, calendar) for everything

4. Ignore that immensely powerful operating system underneath your browser in favor of a hacked-together glorified document viewer.

Just uploaded the image links for VMWare and VirtualBox as well as installation instructions to http://www.memac.com/chromeos

in case anyone is interested to try it out.

Ensure you change the root password after the installation is done.

I'm playing with it, how do you change the root password?

OK, got it from http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/20/how-to-run-chrome-os-as-a...

Ctrl+Alt+t opens up a terminal, sudo password is chronos

I'm going to wait for someone to compile it as a bootable USB drive.

If you compile from source as described here http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/building-chromium-os at the end you can make a bootable USB drive.

I'm writing this on Chromium OS booted from a USB drive on an Acer AspireOne. Wifi and trackpad do not work but the rest is fine. Trying to find a way to switch to Dvorak.

Wifi and trackpad do not work but the rest is fine

Seems Google just stole the same market-share normally composed of Linux-users.

I would've uploaded my image if it weren't for the fact that the bootable USB image is 2.8GB.

zip it?

Torrent, then you have other people helping out before you've even finished the upload.

Zipped it is 330MB or so

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/75150/chrome-os-0.4....

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