Webb Family Blog

A few months ago, I bought an Asus EEEpc 900 for $150 from a Woot! one-day sale. I have tried several operating systems on it so far. I did not like the flavor of Linux that came on the machine, so I changed it over to Easy Peasy 1.5. I probably did not give Easy Peasy a fair evaluation before changing to Jolicloud. I have been using Jolicloud now the majority of the time.

Now, just a little bit on a netbook for those that don’t know. A netbook is a small laptop computer that is limited in size and does not include a CD or DVD drive. The key advantage is that it is small and portable. This particular netbook has a slightly smaller than standard keyboard and a 8.9″ screen… much smaller than my 17″ widescreen laptop I take with me nearly everywhere I go. Why did I get the netbook in the first place? Well, there have been many times Kellie or I wish to look something up online while in bed or sitting on the sofa watching television. It is much more convenient to pull out a computer the size and weight of a small novel. Now, this netbook does not have a traditional hard drive, but a 4GB solid-state drive; pretty darn small. I boosted the RAM from 512 MB to 2 GB (almost as much as its storage memory). As it has limited storage, I setup the netbook to mount my network shared drives from my FreeNAS system, giving it the equivalent of about 3TB of storage, which is like infinite storage to a netbook.

OK, so after the background on a netbook, I’ve been using Jolicloud. The netbook seems to have gotten slower and slower over the past month, to the point it was getting too slow to use. Something had to change. I’ve been hearing quite a bit of talk about Google coming out with its own operating system that they are calling Google Chrome… the same name as their Internet browser. Google has said it won’t be releasing their operating system until sometime later next year, but as it is primarily an open-source operating system, they have a development version of the operating system that they call Chromium. While Chromium is based on the Linux operating system, calling Chromium a distribution of Linux is like calling Apple MacIntosh’s OS X a distribution of BSD; once you are using the operating system, there is no evidence of the system it is based on.

From the Chromium development website, they do not offer a built operating system, but rather the source files for every person wishing to do so, to build their own operating system from a collection of thousands of source files. Despite following the directions for building the operating system from source files, I kept getting build errors when I tried to build it myself. After wasting several hours in pursuit of building the operating system, I searched to see if anyone was distributing a built version. Thankfully, I did find someone was distributing a built version… calling it ChromeOS Cherry. After much trial and error, I finally was able to write an image of the operating system to a USB thumbdrive. When you boot up the netbook to the USB thumbdrive, it does not make it obvious how to actually install the operating system. Initially, it just runs the OS from the thumbdrive… nice for those wanting to try it out, but the thumbdrive is much slower than running off internal storage. I found that if I press <Control>-<Alt>-<T>, it opens up a terminal window. I was then able to type in “/usr/sbin/chromeos-install” and it will install. Once it was installed, it would take less than 10 seconds to boot-up.

I now have Chromium installed on the netbook… how well does it work? Well, I have mixed reactions. Because the operating system is so lean, the responsiveness is great. I have only had a couple hours to play on it so far, but I am finding that it is severely limited in function. The browser IS the operating system. The “applications” are not really applications, but rather bookmarks that open in a new tab. I don’t currently see a way to add any applications. Being that it is based on a Linux OS, I was hoping that I may be able to add programs from the command line, but I don’t know the administrative password, nor how I would access the added applications via the GUI (graphical user interface). There is also no visible method for adding a network printer, nor how to access anything that is downloaded. If all I want to do is LOOK at the Internet, this is a nice easy operating system. As the Chrome (Chromium) browser is still relatively in its infancy, there are not many extensions available yet… such as my favorite Firefox extensions… Xmarks and LastPass (Xmarks is in development for Chrome, but I don’t know how to add it to this version).

While it is interesting to try, I think I’m going to give Easy Peasy a better look for now.