I took some free time to write about some new Google services that might be starters for new technologies that might change the way we interact with our computer and the Internet in the future.
Chromium OS
There’s been 6 days now since Google’s Chromium OS sources have been released, and with all the commotion around it I’ve been dying to test it too. So, I downloaded the build from the guys at gdgt and since I already had VirtualBox installed on my linux machine, there was nothing else left to do than to create a new virtual machine, feed it the Chromium OS image and let it do it’s job.
Since Chromium OS’s targets are small netbooks, I gave the virtual machine 1 processor and 384MB of RAM. The boot didn’t last 7 seconds (like they said), but considering i was running an unofficial build in a virtual machine, it was pretty fast.
Normally, logging in with your Gmail account should work, but in my case it didn’t: “Network not connected and offline login failed.”. I then found out that at first use you should try one of these accounts:
username: mark, password: chronos
username: chronos, password: (blank)
, and then it should work well with your Gmail account.
I logged in and…no surprise, just like in the videos, an almost exact copy of the Chrome browser appeared on the screen, with the slight differences that it shows you the battery life, your internet connection and an options menu in the upper right part of the window.
Unfortunately, as you can see, internet connection doesn’t seem to work. I tried all posibilities, but still no internet connection available in the virtual machine. Some people who tested on VirtualBox also complained about this, altough on some folks it worked (TODO: try booting the image from VMware).
Fortunately, I don’t think I missed much, as I said it’s Google Chrome as an independent OS.
Now, people all around the world have been saying stuff like “Google has gone nuts, they can’t replace a real OS with a browser”, but I think they don’t really see the goal here. Many people use their computer just for surfing the web, instant messaging, listening to music, writing documents, simple tasks that can be done just from a browser. Why would I need a full OS on my 700Mhz, 512MB RAM netbook? I obviously can’t do much with that configuration, and a real OS would run like crap. So what Google has done here is going fast on the internet at low cost.
It didn’t work too well for me today, but the official version of Chromium OS will be released about this time next year, so I’m curios how it will finally turn out.
PS: a nice tutorial for trying out Chromium OS is available here.
Google Chrome on Linux
While Google engineers are working hard to make Chrome available for Linux platforms, the guys at CodeWeavers made CrossOver Chromium, a version of Chrome that runs on Linux (Chromium is the open-source project name behind Chrome).
Unfortunately, the result is pretty disappointing: the Enter key doesn’t usually work in the browser, on display resolution 1280×1024 the window refuses to maximize, the “Enter text to search” box doesn’t really work, the browser stopped responding a few times and also refused to close sometimes (it has an interesting personality!). So, until the official release, I guess I’ll hang around with Firefox and Opera.
PS: I browsed around the Chromium project sources, and since lately I’ve been reading more & more about threads and paralellism I thought “hey, why not look around how Google implements threading’n’stuff”. After looking through several files, such as this some of the first things I observed were:
1. Wtf^^
2. Stuff I’ve seen in OpenMP are cute ponies compared to this.
3. // TODO(darin): Unfortunately, we need to keep message_loop_ around until
// the thread exits. Some consumers are abusing the API. Make them stop.
Google Wave
Though CrossOver Chromium and Chromium OS didn’t work too well for me, the good news is I finally received an invitation yesterday for a Google Wave account 
It looks quite cool, friendly simple interface, we’ll see if it will actually replace our old e-mail. As you can see from the image below, for now there aren’t much options or widgets but I’m sure it will be highly configurable by the official launch. So, all we gotta do now is start waving!
