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Booting ChromeOS from USB
August 21, 2010 | 8:52 pm
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By Chris Meadows
Google’s Android OS has become pretty much the go-to operating system for cheap tablets and e-book readers these days. But what of Google’s other OS, ChromeOS, that is rumored to be hitting tablets by Black Friday?
If you’re curious, and have a computer that is hardware-compatible and a spare USB drive, you can actually try it out and see for yourself. ReadWriteWeb notes that a developer going by “Hexxeh” has been compiling both a modified Chromium (the developer version of Chrome) build called “Flow” and an unmodified, straight-developer build called “Vanilla”. These can be downloaded and placed on a bootable USB drive for experimentation.
ReadWriteWeb also links to a blog post by Lee Mathews of the Download Squad with some additional tips and advice for Vanilla experimenters. Among other things, Mathews notes:
Not all hardware is going to work. The Chromium x86-generic images don’t include a ton of drivers, so you may be missing one fairly important piece of the puzzle: wifi support. Most netbooks will work 100% — full-sized laptops are more iffy.
On a related note, Computerworld reports that the newest beta of Chrome 6 includes menus that have been optimized for touch operation, possibly hinting at the new tablets that are supposedly on the way.
Has anyone tried this OS out yet? What do you think? How is it going to work as a netbook or tablet OS, and might it also make a good e-reader?
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Comments:
The note about drivers and hardware is accurate. Would not work at all on my MacBook Pro when I first tried it, but I have read this evening that two builds this week were broken. Tried it again on a home-built quad core box, but the dual-SLI graphics with two monitors were too much for it. finally got it working on my wife’s dual-core Ubuntu box, which has pretty vanilla hardware.
Seems pretty fast for early code and lightweight enough to be interesting for a laptop or tablet. Potential is there for wicked speed if an SSD is used instead of a mechanical HDD.
Re. Your question about it’s potential as an ebook reader – Google’s plans are to serve ebooks from the cloud so with a lightweight rendering engine in the OS it could be very good. Hopefully, no ADE or other DRM impediments.
It will be interesting to see how quickly Amazon and Kobo release reader apps for this. My bet is, both will release very quickly.
When Google officially releases the OS, I plan to install it on an Acer dual-core laptop which no one here wants to use because it runs Vista. Should be a decent test-bed for ebooks on Chrome.