Instant-on Linux: You're Doing It Wrong
I was going to write the sequel to my last post, but then I got sidetracked by school and other issues, so it got postponed for a bit. In the meantime, a much more important development came to light: Chromium OS.
Well, more specifically, the first development release. There was big excitement about it, and it's all about "hey look a fast Chromium-based instant-on Linux OS". So, you know, being an open source nerd, I should probably mention it.
... And how it doesn't live up to expectations.
B-but isn't everything Google makes m-magical?
See, in its introductory videos, Google promises an operating system that would be really quick to load and get on the web, and that would be optimal for netbooks. It cites the fact that the whole world is migrating to the web as the counterweight for the fact that Chromium OS is in fact rather feature-lacking. What do I mean by feature-lacking? Well, imagine an operating system that is literally just your browser. Forget Windows compatibility, this is running on a Linux kernel. But here's some essentials I found missing:
- Terminal access: I wanted to see what environment Chromium set up for itself! No use. The default X screen is on TTY1 (accessed by ctrl+alt+F1), and the other TTYs just give me series of random colored ASCII characters. I mention just TTYs because its Ctrl+Alt+T supposed terminal shortcut didn't work, and:
- It has no GUI apps: Even though GTK is clearly installed (for menus, the network manager interface, etc.) no GTK windows can ever be opened. Even the interface menus and popups appear fullscreen. Does Chromium not have a window manager?!
- Package manager: Okay, maybe it doesn't come preloaded with Solitaire, but how the heck do I install it? Chromium used a bootstrapped chroot environment to compile, and installed a ton of stuff using APT, but inside Chromium itself... there seems to be no such ability to install anything.
- Application-ish things: Right now Chromium OS is the Chromium browser with no window border, surrounding programs, operating system, or anything else to tie it down. That's fine, but if you're going to not allow me to use Pidgin, at least give me some sort of Google Chat across all tabs, maybe with a notification icon... or that sort of thing? Don't make me use Google Talk through GMail, Google.
- Addons, addons, addons: (general complaint about Chromium Browser, also applies to OS) It may not be in Google's best interest to push for an open addon architecture, which would allow things like AdBlock, which lessen its profits. Maybe just something like the iTunes App Store? Everyone likes customizations.
The former three make it a pretty sad excuse for a "Linux" OS, although they may deserve an award for making Linux more useless than a USB Pet Rock.
It doesn't not do anything, it has a very Zen outlook on life!
I'll leave the more advanced reviews for people who actually know their operating system, and finish off with one last observation. Chromium is supposed to be fast, right? Well, on my laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, for a gauge of specs) it was taking around 2 seconds to respond to a mouseover, or a simple click. Two seconds! The mouse was responsive enough, but Chromium itself was lagging. So badly, in fact, that despite the wifi working right off the bat, I wasn't even able to say "hi" to my friends on AIM or Google Talk from within Chromium. It was running off a USB drive.
For those tl;dr people out there, in short: Chromium is premature, and some plain design choices of how to use Linux to its full potential for its use may just be wrong... IMHO.
A small mention of an instant-on Linux OS that seems to guarantee faster speeds and more usability than Chromium is Splashtop. I just ran across it while reading responses by users and competitors to Chromium, and it seems like a great open source option for instant-on computing.
Just a note - I am posting this from within a virtual machine running Chrome OS. I am seeing a very slight lag between what I am typing and it appearing, but not significant at all, and I'm not sure it's not coming from the VM. It took literally 4 seconds to boot the VM, which makes me very hopeful for performance on an actual machine. I might try rigging my eeepc to dual boot this weekend, as it was mentioned as one of the machines Google has been working closely with.
A few things:
- "... questionably supported hardware" - since it's supposedly Linux, it includes just the same drivers Ubuntu does, so it should work just as well. Heck, I saw all the drivers being compiled! Plus, VM drivers are more often the issue than not, and it was only slightly faster when I ran it in virtualbox.
- "... without the crap you don't use 90% of the time" - well yes, but each user has their own minor crap outside the browser, which crap they use 90% of the time. Pidgin, in my case. I was complaining about them not offering a suitable replacement perhaps giving the illusion that it's an app outside the browser.
- Boot time and lag: I think this would actually be a discrepancy between the products we actually used. You downloaded and used binaries for Chrome OS, just like you use Chrome as a browser, not Chromium. Chromium OS is not really supported by Google. Google just grabs it, brands it, does a couple of closed-source bug fixes and improvements, and publishes the binaries. It also provides funding and sort of guides the direction development goes. I tested Chromium OS as the fast-boot, lightweight browser-based OS it was supposed to be, and I was disappointed. Maybe what I said doesn't concern most users, but that means Chromium/Chrome is alienating power users.
And that's bad.
You could just ignore everything I said though, since I'm also the same guy who was sad about it being almost impossible to get a web server running off my iPhone. :)
1) Just because Linux can support everything out there doesn't mean that they are going to throw support for everything into their 7 second boot OS. That prevents the whole 7 second boot. I don't know about your hardware, so I can't say that this is actually an issue, but I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility, especially seeing as Google said they would initially aim to support only a small subset of hardware.
2) Certainly an issue with the concept in general. A lot of people do have little apps they use as well as a browser. Google, however, thinks that sacrificing non-browser based versions of these apps can reduce complexity and security loopholes enough to make it worthwhile. Chrome OS won't be the right choice for everyone, especially not power users, but as something that most people would be happy to use, sure, I think it stands a chance.
3) I am not sure what you mean here. We ran pretty much the same thing. At this point, there is no difference between "Chrome OS" and "Chromium OS". Chromium is simply the name Google has given to the open source effort behind "Chrome OS", which won't be released for at least a year. The source code made available as "Chromium OS" is simply the current state of "Chrome OS", and serves as an indicator of what the final product might look like.
What you did was download the source code, compile it for your machine, and install it to a USB drive, right? I did the same thing for a VM, only I cheated and didn't do it myself. Someone else downloaded and compiled the source code, and installed it on a VM. They then took the VM "hard drive" file and distributed it. I simply loaded it and had a fully functional, preinstalled version of the OS running for me. In terms of the actual product, though, we got the same thing.
- Okay, I mean they said they're only going to support SSD, which is sort of sad, but eh...
- It might stand a chance... I wouldn't use it though! :)
- I dare you to compile Chromium browser and compare it to Chrome browser installed via an installer. The differences are striking. I'm saying the same is probably true regarding Chromium OS vs Chrome OS.
Well, from what we can tell, at this point, Chrome OS is the same thing as Chromium OS. Chrome OS will continue to be developed by Google. Chromium OS will be left to the open source community. We were both running the only thing that has been released by Google so far, whether you call it Chrome OS (pre-alpha) or Chromium OS (current release... bloody hell).
You don't need text TTYs. I'm pretty sure BSD doesn't have them, and I know Solaris doesn't.
Boot to a live environment from removable storage and chroot. Or boot to single user mode. Either will work.
Note that to get into single user mode you may have to (gasp, no way) modify the line in grub or lilo when you boot.
You're looking at this the wrong way. Chrome OS (despite the name) is not supposed to be a new, better, or even faster "Linux OS". Google's point is that for a lot of what (most people) do with their computers, you don't really *need* an OS. Chrome OS is Google's attempt to provide people the option to not bother installing an OS when all they need is a web browser. This is Google trying to give us the browsing experience without the crap that you don't use 90% of the time. And I think thats a good thing.
As for speed, thats what you get for running it on questionably supported hardware, off a USB, the week after it's early dev release.