Hi everyone — quick hello from Chrome OS! This post goes back to 2010, when I was writing it from an early, unofficial development build of Chrome OS, well before Google’s own Cr-48 pilot laptop existed.
First thing worth mentioning: the font. It looks great. I run Ubuntu most of the time, and the default font there has never been my favorite — yes, I know I can change it — but this blog has never looked better to me than it does here in Chrome OS.
I’m running Chromium OS Zero, the build packaged by developer Hexxeh. Getting it onto a USB drive was simple: download the .tar file, extract it, and write it to a USB stick with ImageWriter on Ubuntu. It booted fine on both an Acer 4520 and an Acer 5920.
The first time you boot from the USB and try to sign in, you may hit a network error. Try the default account — username and password both set to “facepunch” — to get in. From there you can connect to Wi-Fi, and subsequent logins should go smoothly. A friendly warning, since this is an early developer build: try it on a spare machine rather than your main computer or laptop.
Outside of the cursor, fonts, and the Chrome OS menu, the whole experience looks a lot like the Chrome browser itself, just without the windows and taskbar of a traditional OS. Connecting to Wi-Fi was simple: pick your network, enter the password in the popup that appears, and you’re online.
Everything here feels fast and clean. I don’t miss Windows or Ubuntu while using it, and it’s made one thing clear: the vast majority of my time at a laptop is spent inside the browser. A future Chrome OS netbook makes a lot of sense to me.
P.S. I still can’t find an option to shut the computer down!
