A quick and grumpy look at ChromeOS

Having been through the challenge of rebuilding Android, your editor was not in a great hurry to try to make a working version of ChromeOS. Happily, that proved not to be necessary: the folks at Dell put together a ChromeOS build for the 10v, one of which your editor recently acquired to play with Moblin. It was just a small matter of downloading the 7.5GB USB image - a task requiring only a few days with your editor's less-than-impressive DSL connectivity. Of course, during that time, the install image was replaced with another which weighs in at a mere 320MB. Progress is always a wonderful thing to behold.

Booting the image is straightforward enough; after about 15 seconds, ChromeOS comes up with a blue login screen. This being a Google product, it should not be surprising that login names are Gmail account names; the system will nicely add the @gmail.com should the user forget about it. Of course, ChromeOS does not come up with a functioning network on the 10v, leading one to wonder just how the login credentials can be validated. ChromeOS can remember login information, but only after a successful login. Your editor was forced to resort to actually reading the instructions, wherein he learned to use the default dell@gmail.com account that comes wired into the downloaded system.

As has been reported elsewhere, ChromeOS presents itself primarily as a web browser. The instructions on the Dell site suggest that it should be possible to get a terminal window, but your editor never succeeded in that goal. It was all Chromium, all the time. As a web browser, it works well enough, but your editor does not spend all of his time messing around on the web, occasional appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

A small icon in the upper left corner leads to the screen shown on the right. This screen would seem to nicely characterize the ChromeOS experience, at least in this stage of its development. It's all logos for services - generally commercial services - available out on the net somewhere. ChromeOS, it seems, is the ultimate consumer's system. It seems like the logical evolution of the television set. Indeed, one could argue that, like a television, the main reason for the existence of ChromeOS seems to be to show advertisements.

Now, one should use great care in coming to conclusions about an operating system that is nearly a year away from a real release. Things will certainly evolve considerably over the coming months, and ChromeOS can only acquire useful features which are not available in this preview. But the emphasis of this system seems clear: ChromeOS is designed to be a thin front-end, with the real computing happening elsewhere, preferably at Google.

Your editor's review of Moblin-based distributions on the same device had a mixed conclusion. But it must be said: the Moblin approach looks quite a bit more interesting (to your editor) than the ChromeOS approach on these small devices. Moblin, too, has a strong focus on ensuring that the user can distribute wisdom on Twitter and Facebook with as few obstacles as possible. But Moblin is also a Linux system which is more than happy to let the user under the hood and to install and run applications locally. A Moblin system is still a Linux computer; a ChromeOS system - at least, in this stage of its development - seems much more like a closed appliance.