In order to get my feet wet with Google’s Chrome OS (in it’s current developer build state, Chromium OS properly) and test a real world workflow with this “web only” device I figured I’d put together a blog post with some photos courtesy my new DSLR never leaving the Chrome “browser” now grown up to an OS… let’s go.

Getting Ready

It wasn’t much of a chore to get Chromium OS up and running on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, I decided to go with @hexxeh‘s build and run it directly from an SD card rather than build Chromium OS from source on my Ubuntu box for simplicity’s sake. I only had one small hiccup moving Hexxeh’s image file to the SD card in Ubuntu which was cleared up by visiting his wiki, he has instructions for loading the USB/SD card from Mac and Windows too.

Start Up

I booted from the SD card and in less than 10 seconds had a login box, wow… much quicker than my daily stand by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Currently with most Chromium OS builds the first thing you need to do is log in as an admin user and fire up your wifi before restarting and logging in as yourself with any Google account, no problems here. Once you are logged in the Chromium logo in the top left shows you the menu screen with a nice launcher, it also loads up your GMail and other Google tools for you right off the bat.

More Than Meets the Eye

The web app I use for photos on this blog is Flickr so I fired it up and popped my memory card into the card reader not knowing exactly how a “web browser” would handle that… not to my surprise but certainly to my delight a slick little content browser popped up auto mounting my card and allowing me to view the files in what else but Chrome. Using Flickr’s uploaders on Linux in general is not the prettiest endeavor but it all worked I quickly discovered the ESC key is the key to closing full screen windows and all was well.

Conclusion

I easily fired up WordPress and threw together this post of no more than a little geek and eye candy just to see how it all held together and I would say for Chrome OS’ current young vintage that things are very well. Hardware support was awesome, no tweaking for me (some of that likely is credit to Hexxeh, thanks!), the software and its all web based workflow work well for the cloud residents like me and I think the simplicity will appeal to the current desktop bound user who’s lost files, gotten burned by viruses and simply doesn’t have time to understand all the bells and whistles those boxes are now full of…

…I didn’t miss semi-transparent flying minimizing windows or things “snapping” to my screen once during the writing of this post.