Chrome os

[BlackHawkA4]

Anyone know a good chrome os download? Got some sub par computers laying around. Could put them to use.

 

[jdbower]

I've played with Hexxeh's stuff in the past, seemed pretty slick at the time:
Chromium OS builds by Hexxeh

I love the concept of Chrome OS, store everything in the cloud. I've got Ubuntu on my netbook, maybe I'll have to play around with it some more now that the Chrome Marketplace is up and running. My biggest wish is for an SSH client without needing to drop to the command line - if there was an SSH extension I could us from any Chrome OS PC (even one that was more locked down) that would be sweet!

 

[BlackHawkA4]

If I find a good version I thought it would be cool to install on a different partition. Windows 7 on one and when you just need to hit the internet real quick boot up in Chrome.

 

[jdbower]

Hexxeh's build installs to a USB drive, no need to repartition if you want to try it out.

 

[BlackHawkA4]

O, no: I know. I just thought it would be cool to have like that to always have just to boot up real quick.
?
The wifi doesn't work on his build though. Bummer. You know of any other ones?

 

[jdbower]

Too bad, ChromeOS is a bit lacking on drivers since it's only officially supposed to work on a small subset of hardware. You can try searching for your wifi chipset and see if there are any discussions about getting it to work (ChromeOS was/is essentially a modified Ubuntu so it's likely just a matter of hacking the Ubuntu driver into place).

Another option is to see how quickly Ubuntu can boot; using the Chrome browser is nearly the same as Chrome OS minus some cosmetic things (and plus a lot of needless overhead). By installing a basic server image rather than a bloated desktop image, running a really simple window manager (Openbox?), and having it autoload Chrome on login you're most of the way to ChromeOS. While the boot time may not be as fast as ChromeOS it should blow away Win7 and you'll get the full support of Ubuntu's drivers. This should help.

You'll probably need to find a wifi manager as well, which may be a bit more difficult for Openbox as opposed to something like Gnome/KDE/XCFE. Another option would be to start with an Xubuntu desktop (generally considered to be the lowest overhead desktop flavor) and uninstall the crap you don't need. This can be faster from a top-down approach that starts with a working system.

 

[BlackHawkA4]

Maybe ill just run Ubuntu 32 bit for netbook then. I was waiting to try this until I got an external hdd. Was going to run Ubuntu on there. Love it. Just need windows for a lot of things and didn't want to lose it since I already had it.