for when you have no internet…

Note: this is my 69th post since opening my blog

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you would have heard of Google’s web browser, Chrome. If you keep up-to-date with tech news, you’ll probably have heard of Google’s plans to make an operating system based on Google Chrome, to be called ‘Chrome OS’. In July, Google officially launched the operating system, however a version for public use has only become available recently. This blog post will be separated into three sections: firstly a tutorial explaining how to try out Google Chrome OS for yourself (without making any changes to how your computer works at the moment), then some screenshots of my use of Chrome OS (not many, believe me), and finally my review on the operating system (quite short).


0 – Prequisites:

There are a couple of things to note when trying out Google Chrome OS. First and foremost, it’s important to remember that the operating system hasn’t been released officially yet, not even as a beta, so there’s a very high chance that what you see in this version will be a lot different to the final build. This is an ‘exclusive’, if you will. Secondly, you CANNOT use Chrome OS if you have a hidden Wifi network at home. I know this sounds very stupid for a web-oriented OS, but there’s nothing I can do about that… Which brings me to my final point – you CANNOT use Chrome OS without the Internet. It’s pretty much just a Chrome window, which uses online applications.


1 – How to try Chrome OS:

This tutorial will teach you how to boot Hexxeh’s version of Chrome OS off your USB, so you wouldn’t need to sacrifice your current OS or change partitions or anything like that. Think of this as a live CD.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: I would like to reinforce that Chrome OS requires the Internet to operate, and does not support hidden networks. You will need a USB or external harddrive of 2GB or above to install Chrome OS on to, and you MUST BE AWARE that the USB will need to be reformatted.

First thing’s first, you’ll need to download a few things. Chrome OS, of course (BitTorrent for a fast download, or HTTP); Disk Image Writer to write the image to your USB (here); and Ubuntu 9.10 to restore your USB afterwards (here, for iiNet users it won’t come out of your quota – “ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso”).

Using your favourite archiver (I used WinRAR, you can find and download 7Zip for free) extract the *.tar.gz file (you may need to first extract the *.gz and then the *.tar from that), and you’ll have a 1GB *.img file. Run the Disk Image Writer, select the image (ChromeOS-Cherry.img) and your USB drive letter from the drop down box. Click “Write”. The install image will then be copied to the drive. Once it’s done, close the program and you can then boot from the USB drive.

How do you do this? You need to make sure your BIOS is unlocked and that you can change your boot options, shutdown your computer, plug in your USB and as soon as your computer starts, enter your BIOS options and boot from USB. This would obviously vary from computer to computer, but to give you an example, on my IBM Thinkpad I had to press the ‘AccessIBM’ button, then go to ‘other startup device’ and select my USB.

The log screen will soon show – in the final version you’ll be able to log in with your Google account, however for now use the username ‘facepunch’ with the password ‘facepunch’. Then enjoy looking through Chrome OS! Note that the first thing you should do is set up your Internet, since Chrome OS is dependent on this.

FINALLY, I’m assuming you’ll want to fix up your USB – so head over to Ubuntu, burn the ISO to a CD and boot from the CD, choosing to ‘try Ubuntu’ (although feel free to install it if you wish ). Go to System -> Administration -> Disk Utility. On the left-side panel find your USB, and after unmounting your USB delete ALL the partitions so it becomes entirely ‘unallocated space’. Finally, create one large partition from the unallocated space, formatted to NTFS, and restart back into Windows. When you get into Windows, format the USB back into whatever format you wish (it is readable now).


2 – Screenshots and Review:

I’ve decided to group these two sections since, to be honest, I didn’t really get to see much of Google Chrome… I’ll start off with the screenshots (there are only two of them), sorry for the crappy quality but there was no way to take screenshots from within the OS (click for full size):








So, why do I only have 2 ’screenshots’ to offer you? As I mentioned before, Chrome OS can only be used with the Internet, but it DOESN’T support hidden networks like ours at home, so I literally CANNOT use Chrome OS to tell you what it’s like! (Please feel free to comment with your own screenshots or experiences, I’m interested…). I am very well aware that this is not a final release, but in my opinion any operating system without an offline version is doomed to fail.

There’s only one other thing that puzzles me: why is an operating system comprised of merely a Linux kernel and a web browser (doesn’t come with any applications) a whopping 1GB, while Ubuntu, which comes with SO MUCH and is so well-developed, has always been and will always be 700MB? Something’s amiss here…

If you’re having any problems or would like to contribute to this post, please comment below… Otherwise, hope you enjoyed my 69th post!

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