Installing Google Chrome OS

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:21a.m. So you’ve heard about Google Chrome OS? Want to find out more? As soon as I heard it was released I downloaded and compiled it.

It was easy and well documented, however you had to have a Linux box to do it. A day or two later several places released pre-made images of it for both VMWare and USB -however the USB installer was pretty fragile unless you were clueful.

I had already started compiling the OS at work Friday but got sidetracked and forgot to bring it home on a USB key, so I took the faster option of downloading the USB image pre-made.

Booting was extremely fast, in the range of a couple of seconds. After booting up I was given a login screen, there was no hint of what user/password to use and a bit of Googling told me that you can just login with your Google account (it authenticates online), which then logs you into any Google account you have also.

Whilst great in theory, my Eee PC was on the wireless network – requiring the WEP key. To do this I needed to login somehow. After a bit more Googling I found there is an 'offline user' which can be changed at compile time, but because I had a pre-made image I was at the mercy of the person who compiled it and got stuck with the user/pass chronos/chronos.

After logging in I was confronted with a web browser. Nothing else, no menus, no configuration options, no logout, or shutdown buttons, no desktop, no icons, just the browser. After hunting about briefly I found no options or config other than a Wi-Fi icon which allowed me to connect using the password, and extremely basic browser config.

So now I was up and running, I browsed the web, I idly wished I had other web related applications (an IM client would have made a good start) but realized this really is an infant OS with extremely basic setup. At about this time I went to look under the hood and add myself my own offline user, so I used the Ctrl+Alt+T key combo to bring up a terminal, used sudo to get root access.

Upon trying to add another user I got a few permission and locking errors, I quickly realized that root file system was mounted as read-only, and the /home directories were mounted as an encrypted volume when I logged in so they were writeable.

I remounted the root filesystem read/write ( mount -o remount,rw / ), added my user and then tried logging out and back in. No luck it seems, so I checked the home directory of the user I was in, copied necessary files over, tried again, still no luck.

At this point I realized something else must have the username somewhere, so checked /etc and found about 4-5 hardcoded files with the offline username, then found more else where. After editing them all, I still had no luck.

At about the same point I got somewhat distracted and noticed that the filesystem seemed to be over 500MB. This seems rather excessive for such a simple Linux install.

Google Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu, now Ubuntu by default has a lot of extra not-really-needed packages, so I'm guessing they just hadn't got around to removing them.

If I install a base install of Debian, X-Window system and desktop manager I can get it in about the same amount of space (500mb or so).

I checked out how much memory it used, and was surprised to see it using over 600MB of RAM, yet nothing obvious was actually using the RAM. There was no swap at all enabled, and after a bit of checking with Google I saw others using it in a VM also had problems trying to run it on anything less than 512MB RAM, preferred amount was around the 1GB mark.

I assumed here (without checking) that this was for speed, being designed for netbooks mostly, the average netbook has a decent amount of RAM (vs perhaps a Newton or PDA for which they have Android).

Overall:

I think it’s useable and does what it’s designed for. If you are a Linux geek, and have a clue, can hack away at it for fun, it’s amusing for a while.