Google Chrome OS review: First Look
By Benny Har-Even,
Rating: 
Last week, Google surprised many by unveiling its Chrome OS, giving a glimpse of how it would look and more details about how it will work.
However, it revealed that Chrome OS would only be made available on specially designed hardware, and these wouldn't be available to buy until Christmas – in 2010. However, Chrome OS is an open source project and in line with that Google did release the source code. Enterprising individuals then went ahead and created a compiled version of the OS – enabling users to download and run a working OS on their machines in a virtual machine.
It’s not quite the same as running it on native hardware, particularly as speed is concerned but it is a way of getting a flavour of what it’s about. Since then, a version that runs directly from a USB key has also been made available, which should offer a more realistic ‘native hardware’ experience. So far we’ve only had time to try the virtual machine-based version, but we’ll update this once we’ve got the USB version working.
How to install
There’s a compiled version of Chrome available via Torrents but we’ve avoided that version for fear of malware. However, a free version is available from GDGT.com (registration required). Once downloaded, extract the zip to a location on your hard disk.
While the GDGT page says that you can use the free VMware Player, it didn’t work for us. However, Sun’s free VirtualBox did the trick.
Once downloaded, you simply go through the wizard, give your virtual machine a name (ChromeOS seems sensible), tell it what sort of OS you're running on and then choose how much memory you want to assign to it (we went with 1,024MBs). You then simply select an existing hard disk and point it towards the extracted OS image.
Once done, be sure to go to Settings, select Network and then choose ‘Bridged Adaptor’ in the ‘attached to’ menu and then either the wired or wireless connection in the box below. This is crucial as without network connectivity, you won’t get far with Chrome OS. Once done, you just press start to launch the virtual OS.
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Speed...
I installed it on my iMac under VMWare Fusion 3.0. It took around 12 seconds to boot on that (2.2Ghz C2D, 2GB RAM, with the VM having 768MB and both cores to play with). It was incredibly slow, I also have Ubuntu 9.10 in a VM (512MB RAM and 1 core allowed) and Firefox in Ubuntu flies compared to Chrome OS! So much for less code offering more speed! It is very picky in Fusion - as well as "bridged", I needed to specify which adapter, Automatic won't work! Also, if you forget to bridge or you don't select the adapter, you need to rebuild the VM. If Chrome OS doesn't find a working network on first boot, it will never find a working network, no matter what you do to the VM settings! I think I had to rebuild the VM 3 times before it found the network adapter. Chrome OS also seems to get confused if you jump out of the VM and come back again, a couple of times the Ctrl key got "stuck"... It is an interesting experiment, but I think it is ahead of its time, we need better network availability and more reliability. I like the cloud, but I wouldn't trust my data to it, alone. I use a hybrid. I have 3 machines I use regularly and they are all synchronised over the cloud, but the data doesn't sit only in the cloud. A web browser is fine, but some things (Email, chat, Twitter, Office etc.) are still better with "fat" clients. The Web experience needs to improve somewhat (and maybe move beyond HTML), before it will be an adequate replacement for ALL fat apps. For an easy to use web browser based machine, it will be fine. For full blooded working environments, it has a way to go - there an RDP or Citrix thin client is still a better bet...
By big_D on Friday Nov 27
ummm...
takes less than 4seconds for my system to load it. from time I press power to splash. I've only tried it on a fast machine and I also didn't need to set bridged adapter... it just worked. It is very, very limited and about the only time I'd ever use it as it stands - on a pc I mean - is if I was travelling and wanted to use a secured computer to access the internet - plug in the USB and go. Or if I want someone to use one of my computers with sensitive info to access the net only.
By IhamMhee on Friday Mar 19