Chromium OS tweaked for Dell Mini

Stephen Withers
Monday, 30 November 2009 06:29

Business IT - Open Source

A Dell employee has released a version of Google's Chromium OS that he has customised for the Dell Mini 10v.

Google recently released its Chromium OS project (the basis of Google Chrome OS) to the open source community.

"Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web", according to the project's home page.

The basic idea is that if all your applications are online, all an operating system really needs to be able to do is run the browser that you'll use to access them, and secure itself against Internet-based attacks.

If you don't share Google's vision and instead believe that you need to install and run applications locally in case you don't have an Internet connection, then move along, there's nothing for you here.

But for the rest of you...

Dell employee Doug Anson has tweaked the code so that it runs (to some extent) on the company's Mini 10v netbook. This model is popular among OS experimenters, and can also be found running Mac OS X, for example.

Anson released an image of his custom build of Chromium OS so that other people can transfer it to a USB stick and boot from there.

He warned that "It's definitely not perfect" and that one of the biggest issues is that it can take 5-10 minutes to establish a wireless connection. There are other problems with the wireless stack, he added. "When in doubt, reboot and give it another try."

Boot-up time is, in contrast, a speedy 12 seconds. Not exactly 'instant on' (and slower than some Chrome OS demos), but a lot quicker than the startup times for most operating systems.

If you're feeling adventurous, you can download Doug's system image here.