Ever since they made the Chromium source code public yesterday morning, I’ve been itching to build it and take it for a spin. I did not know it would take only a couple hours to do that!

Getting and Building

I am so impressed! The instructions on the Getting and Building a Chromium-Based OS page are precise, to-the-point and.. they work! I am not sure if this is brilliant scripting, great documentation, me having just right prerequisites (Ubuntu Karmic Koala), or a combination of all these. But it took me just over an hour or so to download source and build a ‘.vmdk‘ file for VirtualBox. I did not see that coming.

I’ve built other projects from source before. It always involves some figuring-out. Sometimes the documentation is not adequate – may be inadequate for my skill-set. Sometimes the prerequisites are not clearly specified/checked. Building an entire OS, I was preparing for a few days of reading up and figuring things out.

But it was none of that. I just followed the steps – mostly word-to-word – and I had a virtual disk image (.vmdk file) at the end of it all!

The only change I had to do was to BASE_FROM in ~/chromiumos/src/platform/chrome/copy_chrome_zip.sh to use build.chormium.org instead of chrome-web. I think this was because I chose not to build Chromium (browser) from source. I am sure this will be ironed out soon (may be it is already).

Using in VirtualBox

I followed the instructions to Convert the image for VMWare, which creates a .vmdk file. Instead of using VMWare workstation, I used VirtualBox to fire it up.

Impressions

I love the concept of Google Chrome OS. I think it is very relevant to how we use the computer these days. It would be even better if Chrome OS would coexist with a normal OS on any laptop. I agree that most often we only use the computer to access the web and do most of our things on the Internet. But I am not ready to give up the full-fledged OS, not quite yet. Does that remind me of SplashTop?

Here are a couple of obligatory screenshots:

Chromium OS build in VirtualBox, running Google Wave

Following is the list of Apps currently on the home page. These showed up only today. Yesterday when I was trying the OS for the first time, one could only use @google.com usernames to sign in. I am sure things are going to be changing fast in the next weeks/months.

Apps on Chromium OS home page

Next…

Next thing I am going to try is to get hold of a 4GB USB drive and see if this image works on my laptop.

Secondly, I am curious to see if the OS updates itself in the VirtualBox, like Google has mentioned. If it does, I should not be required to build another image… ever!

Back to more experiments.

Later…