Hands-On with Google Chrome OS: Not Much to See Here
November 20th, 2009 by Avram Piltch
Ever since we saw Google’s webcast yesterday, we’ve been dying to try an early version of Google Chrome for ourselves. Google released the source code, but not an install disc or file, so we had no idea how to turn that series of code into a working OS. Fortunately, some Linux hackers have managed to compile Chrome so people like us can run it in a virtual machine. Thanks to a virtual machine image we got from gdgt, we were able to take the long-anticipated OS for a spin.
Perhaps we should have expected this, but we were a bit underwhelmed. The current build is extremely slow and one of the key features — the apps panel — is not accessible. Start up took about 15 seconds to present us with the log in screen at right, though it’s hard to say how accurate our start time was, considering that we were running Chrome as a virtual machine in Sun VirtualBox, which was a window on our Windows 7 ($79.95) workstation.
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