Day in, day out…

Today I had a kind of a scare. This morning, I noticed that this blog was down. My first guess was that it should probably be related to the intermittent outages my host was facing.

The blog was sending back 500 – Internal Server Error responses. The error.log file was filled with messages like these:

[Tue Nov 24 10:38:42 2009] [error] [client 149.117.7.28] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Tue Nov 24 10:39:23 2009] [error] [client 149.117.7.28] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Tue Nov 24 10:41:05 2009] [error] [client 209.85.238.214] Premature end of script headers: index.php
[Tue Nov 24 10:41:46 2009] [error] [client 209.85.238.214] Premature end of script headers: index.php

As usual, I looked for help on the WordPress Forums. When the initial suggestions did not resolve the problem, I decided to dig deeper. I downloaded WordPress and extracted a clean install. All I did was moved over this blog’s wp-config.php into this directory. It again resulted in the same 500 – Internal Server Error response. That almost certainly indicated a corrupt database.

Thankfully, reverting to the last good backup is fairly easy in DreamHost Panel. The Restore DB option is available under Actions for each database in the Main Menu → MySQL Databases section of the panel. After restoring the database, the blog was back up and running.

Now, only thing bothering me is – what caused the database corruption? Was it some server glitch, that would hopefully never happen again? Was it a plugin (like IntenseDebate, etc.) that misbehaved? Or a blog management client (like WordPress for BlackBerry, etc.)? Not sure. But the mystery does make me nervous. But for the time being, things look OK!

Chrome OS Update

In my last post about running Chrome OS in VirtualBox, there are some screenshots. As you can see, the default screen size of 800x600 is pretty tiny to do anything useful.

To increase the screen size, I tried two ways I would have tried for any other Linux guest:

• Guest Additions
• Customize /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Not sure why, but I could not install any Guest Additions to the Chrome OS running as guest.

I tried to update /etc/X11/xorg.conf to define screen modes (by first dropping to a shell using ALT + CTRL + t – which, by the way, does not always work for me ). But Chrome OS would not let me save the /etc/X11/xorg.conf, even with sudo. Is this normal?

In any case, I had to take the long route. Updating ~/chromiumos/src/rootfs_static_data/common/etc/X11/xorg.conf and re-building the image. But it worked! Now I am running Chrome OS in 1024x768 mode, which is so much better!

Chromium OS build in VirtualBox, running Google Wave is so much better at 1024×768

That is it for now…

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…