chromium os (a.k.a. the developer build of Google’s new Chrome OS)

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* Edit - I added a Chrome OS UI Concept video from Google at the bottom As you may or may not know, Google today released the source code for their new OS: Chrome OS.  They released it as part of the chromium project.  You can read about it here or here.

Tonight, I spent a little bit of time downloading and compiling chromium os per Google’s instructions under Ubuntu 9.10 in Sun’s VirtualBox.

It turned out to be pretty straightforward.  There were no unexpected obstacles to overcome.  And, as a result, I now have a usb stick (and a VirtualBox virtual hard drive image) of chromium os.  It works!  (I was actually pretty shocked it worked because I have been reading that they wanted to trim everything down to a bare reference platform.  As such, I was surprised that the network and video seemed to be working just fine.)  I haven’t tested it outside of VirtualBox yet (I’m planning to do that tomorrow), but I thought I’d share with you some screenshots.  Enjoy!

It’s still a little rough around the edges.  There seems to be no “logout” feature, for example.  However, boot time was very fast.  It was under 10 seconds after the bios screen, and you can’t help but admire the “goats teleported” statistic. :)

Of course, with all of this Google Chrome OS stuff, I would be negligent not to mention Microsoft’s Azure platform.  Are they ultimately looking to provide the same thing in possibly different or possibly even the same ways?  We’ll see…

"At its core, Azure is Windows—Windows Server"

- Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Nov. 19, 2009 during a keynote speech. (quote pulled from this article: Microsoft's Thinking About Azure Platform Evolved