Yes, there is a small, working Chrome OS available!


Yesterday was the last day of finals here at the university, and with most things wrapping up I was reading the latest IT news. Being a big Google and Chrome/Chromium fan, I have been following the Chrome OS news and saw an article saying a copy was available to anyone who signed up at GDGT. So I went there and signed up and downloaded both their VMWare and their USB versions of Chrome OS. Unfortunately I tried writing the USB image files to a flash drive and realized my 2GB flash drive would not work -- it needed a 4GB flash drive which I did not have. Why does Google Chrome need 4GB of space just to boot into a browser? I thought it was supposed to be small and light! So it was time to do some Google searches and see what people said about this predicament. It appears that some fellow with the moniker "Hexxeh" has taken the Chromium OS project and compiled it to fit on a 1GB flash drive, calling it "ChromiumOS Cherry". I downloaded his image, copied it to my 2GB flash drive and sure enough it booted up on my Dell Latitude D630. I just timed it, and once I hit Enter to boot off the flash drive, it takes about 11-12 seconds until it comes to the login screen, and about 4 seconds after I hit Enter after typing in "facepunch" twice for it to come up into Chromium. Wow, that is pretty fast. It works fine with my wired Ethernet connection, but it does not recognize the built-in wireless on my D630. It is pretty cool anyway and it does give a good sneak peak at the Chrome OS look and feel.

And I was able to get my development Chromium builds on my Ubuntu desktop to work fine with Flash now. All I had to do was delete the old Flash plugin in my home directory and the new one works fine. The new problem is all these stupid sites with Flash ads on their front pages work now! Why do so many sites have these annoying ads? Do they really think anyone is going to purposely click on them except to try to find the mysteriously hidden "Close" button? The two ones that annoy me most are local, ksdk.com and stltoday.com. I do not mind banner ads nor the ads in the beginning and endings of videos, but Flash ads that just appear in the middle of the page (and those annoying NetFlix pop-ups) drive me crazy. The worst one I noticed was a survey for Yahoo! Mail that popped up the other day and I could not get rid of it at all. My solution was to log out of Yahoo! Mail and then log back into it. You would hope Yahoo! would know how to do these things correctly.

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