[or... why sleeping only 21 hours over a 96+ hour marathon software launch is not a good idea, but boy, is it fun! ;-]
I wanted Google's ChromiumOS to play with because it was new, different, and because I believed in it. Here was an operating system for a pc type device that is designed to be an internet tool. Not a cell phone, not for use on a full powered pc, with local storage, large displays, and lots of power user programs. It is designed to be used to connect you to the things you do online. On the go, mobile like you are. From a lightweight desktop at home, down to a netbook or tablet, this little operating system does everything you need, runs on inexpensive devices that run for hours, and guess what? It's free ;-] The core kernel of ChromiumOS was open sourced to the global community to build systems out of by Google in November 2009. I like free...
Best way to find out how something works is to take it for a test drive, so I started searching the net for versions I could test [I had heard people were close] and found a few. The couple I tried first were not quite ready to actually test, but I heard one was, so I grabbed a copy of ChromiumOS Zero
http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/, Hexxeh's most recent version, and started testing. Zero was written by a young developer known to the open source community as Hexxeh. [pronounced
heck-see] I downloaded Zero, burned it to some usb sticks and started testing various laptops and netbooks. ChromiumOS Zero worked on over 90% of the devices I tested it on.
Impressive...
"Worked" means I was able to boot the device running ChromiumOS Zero, log in and connect to the net. Authenticate would be a better term to use. When you boot up ChromiumOS, the default login screen uses your Gmail credentials to log you into your gmail account. Yes, your account. Not just bring up a web browser but log you into your "home" directory of your google apps. Gmail. Google Talk. Google Docs, all of your Google apps are just an icon click away. Need to upload that video you just shot to YouTube? to Picasaweb? Lots of apps, both Google's and the others were there in in Zero. Welcome the Cloud people... wow. Many new apps and features/bug fixes were promised for the next version, Flow, but by now, I did not want to wait, I had hardware that was failing tests, I know stuff like this and how to hack at it until you break it or finally get it working, so I did what any open source person would do, I proceeded to go hang out where the development was going on and check things out.
Made a pest of myself is more like it... ;-] The key is pushing hard enough to get "in", but not too hard, so I used my instigator's skills to make it easier to give in than to fight me anymore [what a pest I was... ;-] and ended up helping with all kinds of things leading to the release on Feb 14th. By Friday night it became clear that a lot of people, from all around the world were interested not only in ChromiumOS Flow, but in just how the heck a 17 yr old college kid was managing to not only produce a bootable ChromiumOS image, but that he was doing it at a higher quality level and sooner than anyone else. [that I know of...] Very impressive...
Hexxeh announced a release date of Feb 12th, 2010 [Dude!!! never commit to a date! "the week of" is good enough... ;-] ChromiumOS Flow shipped on Feb 14th, 2010 after many bug fixes, reflows, apt-gets and emerges, peaking with a loud groan of agony when a certain "upstream change" nearly sunk Hexxeh on Saturday [what were they thinking?!?!?! emerge? are you kidding me? the day Hexxeh was supposed to launch? Arrggghhhh!!!! ;-] He found a way around that problem... magic.
I hear ChromiumOS Flow works well, really well. It does on all my hardware. I really hope a lot of people download it and take it for a spin. To make it so it can update itself via the net, Hexxeh had to increase the size from a 1GB usb stick to a 2GB stick. Small price to pay. You download the compressed image [327MB] from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net and follow the simple instructions. Unzip the image. Copy the image to the usb stick. Insert the usb stick into a pc that can boot off a usb drive, and log onto the net. Best way to start for the first time is to have the pc plugged into a lan connection. If you only have wireless access, all is not lost, there is a local account you can use to log in locally because you have to configure the wireless with router passwords from the GUI. Hexxeh promises a fix for this soon.
I am not the best reviewer of applications, but from a hardware support point of view, Hexxeh has everything I had to test with covered except Intel's GMA500 Poulsbo graphics chipset. Shame on you Intel... No open source drivers for the GMA500? tsk, tsk... Hexxeh says he will get it working... ;-] Here is some of what I tested:
- eee pc 1000H 10" netbook - had some wireless issues up until the last beta test. Whoot! pass
- Acer Aspire KAV10 10" netbook - perfect
- Acer Aspire Revo R1600 nettop w/nVidia ION 3d graphics - hdmi out to a 1920x1080 TV. stunning. perfect.
- AMD X2 64bit cpu w/ATI 3d graphics - perfect but needs driver work... ATI? hello?
- Acer Aspire ZA3 11" LED netbook - works fine, but the graphics performance... Intel... GMA500? remember? grrr... [I have 3 of them... ;-]
- HP mini 1000 - has a 3g wireless card issue that Hexxeh could not solve that night. All is not lost... Auto updater, remember? Fix might be out any day...
For a full hardware compatibility list, check the wiki:
http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/wiki/doku.php
The really cool thing you can do with Hexxeh's ChromiumOS Flow is to use it as a safe way for kids to surf the net. When your child wants to get online, plug a ChromiumOS Flow usb stick into your normal home pc, and it boots into chrome. Your child logs into gmail, and is protected by all the parental control tools you have with children's Gmail accounts. See:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=69797 for more information. Another great feature is that when running off the usb like this, nothing ChromiumOS encounters on the net can harm your pc or it's data. Safe. I like safe. Perfect for people that really do not know how to use PCs well, and I bet it is pretty hard to infect with viruses [
virii?]. Of course it's safe, it's
Linux.
What also surprised me during my entire stay with the team was the number of people who were clamoring to learn how to do what Hexxeh was doing, or how they can learn about Linux, most of them kids. Really eager kids. Lots.
I have been in the open source online community since 1996. I played multi-player games [Marathon!] with co-workers at Disney Online after hours a lot. In '95 a co-worker brought in 8 floppies, looked at me and said "wait 'til I load this..." Quake I. Wow. As soon as Quake 2 got me on the internet to game for the first time, I knew I had to run my own server. What? Linux on a pc? Already? Sweet. Install it in text mode, and never leave the command line. That's where the open source world lives... on the command line...
The world I live in and work in has desktops with GUI's for doing email, docs, communication and tools. They are also home PCs full of all of our entertainment and fun stuff. The servers that a really big chunk of the internet runs on are in cool dark datacenters, usually a long way from any user that needs to do any interaction with, and processing even the data to maintain a graphical interface with that user is not a good use of the server's processing power. You access these computers out on the 'net from a text window or "terminal" that you can run on almost anything. Text mode, command line.
What am I going to work on next? I'm going to hang out my shingle and teach, but in an online classroom, not so much at a college. How? That is one of the coolest things Google has given me... Everything I need to create a complete Linux instruction environment. I have gdocs, gmail, gtalk, and maybe someday I can video conference via Google Voice. Googlewave came in real handy tracking issues and status in real-time leading up to the launch of Flow. I supply a virtual Linux server the students can use to run their labs and research/practice on. Google gives me tools that 90% of the classrooms in the world do not have, and its
online, where everyone can connect up, no matter where they are, no matter what timezone they are in. Remember, these are all
collaborative tools. That means that everyone sees each others' changes in real-time, with changes saved every few seconds into the cloud. sweet! free! I like free ;-]
I teach for free, because 95% of what I have learned, I learned from others who wanted to share their knowledge. Can you make a living at this? Probably not, but if someone benefits from what they have learned, then maybe they will want to drop a contribution into the tip bucket for server&storage costs. It is the open source way ;-]
A lot of people in ##hexxeh over that 5 day period contributed a lot to this launch, but Hexxeh was the key to it's success. It was he that gave me the initial idea on teaching. No matter how busy he was, he would take time out to help each person that came in there with a good question, never losing patience, even when the usual response to his answer was "why?" You help out where you can, it
is the open source way...
To the others there who helped [sometimes in unusual ways ;-] or shouted encouragement, a hat tip and a big thank you. You know who you are ;-]
--egrep
