Have you heard about Google’s upcoming operating system ChromeOS and are willing to test it on your computer? Then follow this guide to make it working! ChromeOS is intended to include only the Chrome browser and is only able to run web applications, thus targeting users who spend most of their time in the internet.
Test and use ChromeOS without installing it:
Download a compiled release of ChromeOS. This is the easiest way, you may of course compile it on your own, but that is not part of this tutorial. Use the torrent mirror for fastest downloads. Once it’s done, unpack the image file (ChromeOS-Cherry.img)
Connect a USB memory stick (at least 1GB) to your computer
Download and unpack Win32DiskImager and launch Win32DiskImager.exe. Click on the little folder symbol and select your image file unpacked in step 1. Select the proper drive letter of your USB memory stick in the Device section. Then click Write and confirm the window warning your about a potential physical corruption on your device.
Once it finished writing, unplug your USB device and plug it into the computer you want to test ChromeOS on. Make sure your computer is configured to boot from USB devices as first priority. If your computer is a netbook (e.g. Asus Eee PC), try the steps under Prepare the Asus Eee PC to boot from USB devices in my tutorial on Windows 7 on the Eee PC. Most other computers will have a similar BIOS configuration, though.
Boot from the USB device and wait a few seconds. ChromeOS shouldn’t take long to boot (around 5 seconds on my Eee PC 900).
Login using facepunch as both username and password.
There should be three symbols at the top right corner. The first is showing your battery status (in running ChromeOS on a laptop), the second your WiFi and Ethernet configuration and the third some menus. Click the second one and connect to your WiFi/Ethernet network. This is really necessary since all applications in ChromeOS are web-based!
Enjoy ChromeOS!
Troubleshooting:
I am connected via WiFi/Ethernet but can’t open websites. This may be due to a misconfiguration in your network settings. Sadly, ChromeOS currently has no GUI to configure it, but you can try to do it with the terminal. Press CTRL + ALT + T to open terminal, and go on using Linux commands (e.g. ip addr to see your network configuration, ping to ping other network devices, sudo bash for root user, …)
My screen resolution is not at its maximum. I had this problem a few times and there was no way of fixing it (xrandr in terminal didn’t work and told me that VGA1 was disconnected). Probably ChromeOS has some problems with the display drivers, but restarting the computer always helped.
Flash/YouTube videos are lagging. This happens probably also due to bad/missing video drivers. I don’t think there is a solution for it except finding and installing fitting display drivers for your device and Linux on your own. Hopefully Google will fix this in the final release.
Since Google keeps providing me with new invitations for Google Wave and all my friends have it already, I don’t know what to do with my invites. If you’re interested, just post a comment and I will send an invitation to the E-Mail address provided in the comment form.
If you don’t know what Google Wave actually is, check out my post about the Google Wave Preview!
On 26th November 2009, the ”World’s Largest Digital Festival” DreamHack Winter started in Jönköping in Sweden. I was lucky and won the journey to Sweden as well as the ticket, sponsored by Razer. Razer even chartered a bus and painted it with the Razer logo just for the DreamHack festival:
The official website describes DreamHack as “the word’s largest LAN-party and computer festival” with more than 12,000 participants. DreamHack is focused on everything one can do with computers: gaming, communication, programming, designing, music and so on. Moreover, there were many gaming tournaments with famous teams from all over the world in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Warcraft 3 and Street Fighter.
Participants had to bring their own computers and equipment, but got a quite nice Gigabit Ethernet and an extremely powerful internet infrastructure in return. Speed-Tests I did on DreamHack certified downstreams of almost 100MB/sec and upstreams of almost 50MB/sec. In actual downloads, I was able to reach 7.5MB/s downloading and 8.7MB/s uploading.
In addition to gaming events, there was also a Dream Expo of different hardware and software companies showing products and doing overclocking competitions or giving away products. Furthermore, live bands and singers, games and events on stage and movie screening during night added to the fun. There were also lots of really powerful computers (the best featuring Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 4xGTX 295) with many games installed (Modern Warfare 2, Couter-Strike, Left 4 Dead 2) provided by different hardware and software vendors (Razer, Fujitsu, R.U.S.E). Thus even persons visiting DreamHack without a computer or any hardware had enough to see and enjoy.
Surprisingly, 10% of all participants were female and some were even competing in the tournaments. I will add some pictures and a video in hope of giving you an idea about DreamHack!
If you have used Google Translate earlier, you will have recognized that the translations were mostly awful and that bad that it was hard to understand them at all. This new version improves the quality of translations significantly; now you can actually use it to read websites or texts in foreign languages.
It also adds a dictionary function: Just type in the word you need and it will give you different meanings. Moreover, by clicking on “detailed dictionary”, you have the possibility to see examples of how to use this word in a phrase and listen to the translations.
The real-time translation is also a quite nice feature: You can just type in a sentence, and as you type, it will try to translate it. This reminds me of the live translation called Rosy used in a promotional video for Google Wave. Rosy currently isn’t available for Google Wave users, but the new Google Translate may actually be a testing ground.
