My notes, screenshots and first impressions on Google Chromium OS on VMware!

I was eagerly awaiting the release of Googles ChromeOS (Chromium OS). Google opened up the source at about 10:30AM today and i have it compiled on my Ubuntu 9.04 and working on my Vmware Workstation. Phew! The following are my notes, screenshots and first impressions of the whole experience.

Updates : A few corrections based on comments by Ethan.
  
Updates:  I have uploaded my VMWare  disk (.vmdk) here. Its about 350MB tar gzipped. MD5 Checksum is  8b158acfff42572dce632fdcb0707009. To use this vmdk one needs to first create a virtual machine and give the path to this vmdk file as the logical disk. Note that this is NOT .vmx but .vmdk. Thus you cannot open this file in VMWare directly. You will need to create a virtual machine.

ChromeOS Getting Started Documentation 

The documentation is pretty neat and things worked out-of-the-box for me. I did not have to hack even a line of script. Started by watching the videos and reading the documentation here.

Setup

My compile environment was a Ubuntu 9.04 ACER Aspire Netbook. I actually wanted to get ChromeOS running on the same Netbook but the documentation suggested that the Chrome install process will nuke the entire harddrive and so i opted for creating the VMWare Disk Image instead.

Building the Image

The whole process, right from reading the initial documentation to getting up the VMWare took me about 5 hours and most of it was spent creating the chroot environment, compiling the packages and the kernel. After that, the image building and the creation of the VMWare Disk was pretty quick.

Running ChromeOS on VMware

1. Bootup Time 

Ofcourse, running it on VMWare meant that i could not test its claimed bootup speed! But the bootup definitely 'felt' faster relative to my other OS bootups on VMWare. ChromeOS creates a file called /home/chronos/chrome_startup.log which showed bootup time as 47seconds. I believe that is good on VMware.

2. Login Prompt

The login prompt is plain and simple blue with two boxes for username and password.I noticed two things here:

1. The username/password could be your gmail credentials.That means that your Google account could act as a profile store.Does this mean someone can use a ChromeOS device only when online? Or only having a google account? I am not sure as of now.
   
2. It also accepts the username/password that i created while i was building the code. I think this option would be disabled for regular users.

3. Login Using Google Credentials

To begin with, i logged in with my Google credentials and was presented the following error page saying that the security certificate for google.com was revoked. My login had succeeded.

This seems to be like a bug to me but i will have to do some more trials before concluding that this is a real bug.

4. Login Using regular credentials

I tried logging in with the testuser account that i had created earlier. That seemed to work fine and i finally got presented with a functioning chrome browser.

I could login into gmail.com, reader.google.com, docs.google.com etc. with my regular gmail credentials and could operate my account as usual. No problems. Things even seemed a tad faster in my slow VMWare.

5. Some UI features

From the above screenshot, its clear that all the user sees when he logs in is the chrome browser interface. There is no desktop and no icons. The only icons that i could spot are 4 on the top right: time, an inactive icon, networks and a drop-down menu. A single chrome icon exists to the top left. Clicking on it takes you to Google Shortlinks which i believe is Googles replacement for desktop icons with links to Google Products. Smell a monopoly in the making?
Update: Ethan points out that it will be far from a monopoly because whatever is web-based would be supported. I agree but i would like to wait and watch and would be happy to be wrong.

6. Task Manager and Resource Stats

Clicking on the top gives an option to open the Task Manager which looks as below. This is pretty much the standard task manager except that we see a lot fewer tasks in it. Also, it hints at the multiprocess nature of the Chrome browser.

Clicking on Stats for Nerds shows an additional memory usage view. This is equivalent to typing about:memory in the browser tab. I don't understand everything in the stats yet but will dig in later. For example, i don't understand what  Proportional Memory is.

A minor point: the note in the above figure states that other browsers like IE and Firefox will also be shown here if they are running. This could be due to the fact that the Chrome browser code-base used is the one used for Chrome on desktops. Or maybe they really intend to do that in the future ?

I couldn't navigate any further and could not find out additional shortcuts or additional interesting options and settings. Will need to dig more in the documentation to see if there are more interesting peeks here and there.

7. Browsing of files

The file browser is contained in the Chrome browser itself. Typing file:/// in the address bar shows the root file system as seen when browsing a remote directory. Not the best way to navigate a local file system i guess.

8. Shell and command line tools

To get to the command line, one has to press Ctrl+Alt+T. Frankly, i could not figure out how to navigate back to the GUI or to other open command-line and i had to keep doing Ctrl+Ds on the command line to get back to the GUI.
Update: Ethan points out that typing exit takes us back to the GUI. It is essentially the shortcut Ctrl+D.

The most irritating aspect to me was that standard utilities like ifconfig, route etc. were missing.
Update: I missed this completely. You can access all of these commands by using sudo as Ethan pointed out correctly. Thanks for the correction. 

I could use vi, python and the standard shell builtin commands as far as i tried. Also, I found apt-get and dpkg  installed but it would not let me install any packages using apt-get (the locks were read-only). I am not sure if this is intentional or a bug.

Thats all i could get my hands on for today but this is the beginning and the exploration would continue.I will be digging into the documentation and source code and keep reporting nuggets of information as and when i discover it for myself.

Conclusion

ChromeOS is exciting and would get even more exciting in the coming months and years. I remember my Professor telling us in class that systems should be like 'Toasters' i.e. it must not be required to read a manual to operate it. ChromeOS is definitely a step in that direction. Also, the lean philosophy adopted by ChromeOS should reduce the burden on end users as far as managing and securing systems is concerned. Ofcourse, there will be newer challenges but atleast ChromeOS reduces the surface area of problems.

I think Google needs to watch out and not make ChromeOS a Google-Centric product. That may not be well received by consumers already struggling to break free of existing monopolies.