Chromium OS

So, I've intended to make another post for awhile now, but finals were this week and I have been very busy. During the break I hope to study several new topics, broadening my horizon and giving you folks something to read about. One side project I did succeed at during these busy weeks was building the new Google Chrome OS(Chromium in it's open-source state) and getting it to run on my laptop. I inevitably chose to do the whole thing in Sun's Virtualbox, which is a pretty good virtualization tool except for the difficultly I had using my USB drive(which I never did get to use).
I was going to do a step-by-step , but there are several websites which already do this, including Google's own project website. Instead, I thought I'd just briefly mention the issues I encountered while building it, and my personal observations about running it the first time.
First, after spending quite some time trying to build the chroot environment that is used to configure and build the packages and kernel with no success, I learned that you MUST run the whole process as a regular user, not as root. You should use sudo where appropriate and enter the password but do not login as root with the sudo -i command. If you do this and follow all of the instructions properly, there should be no problem on most systems. When building the packages and the kernel, the script copy_chrome_zip.sh will cause the build to fail because the URLs used in the script are outdated. Typically, the instructions you are using should tell you about this. Now, the operating system is not much to look at. The concept itself is very interesting, and although it may be a revoutionary idea in the future, at the current moment, the features of Chromium OS leave a lot to be desired. More later.


Questions or Comments? E-mail me at timadennis@gmail.com