Diet Chromium OS — Less Filling, Works on Most Everything
Chrome OS has only been “out” a short while, but due to its open-source roots, folks are already making it available for those hardy souls who want to give it a try. Dell has already put it out there for Mini 10v owners, but others were left to their own designs. No more, as a distribution, dubbed Diet Chromium OS, has been released, and reports have it working on just about everything out there.
The first noticeable change is the 300 MB download, down a far cry from the 8 GB that “real” Chrome OS consumes. That makes Diet Chromium OS much easier to get hold of as the download is quite manageable. This explains the distribution’s name. The real magic of Diet Chromium is that driver support has been extended for all sorts of systems. Users are reporting already that Diet Chromium works on everything from netbooks to quad-core powerhouses.
Our buddy Brad at Liliputing has put together a good tutorial for getting Diet Chromium running on a system near you. Brad’s method installs Diet Chromium on a USB drive, so no local system installation is required. You build the USB stick, boot from it, and off you go. I’m definitely going to give this a try.
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I was playing around with this yesterday, and aside from the fact that it doesn’t support the trackpad on my incredibly mainstream Acer Aspire One (which works fine in Ubuntu), it’s fun to try out.
Even off of my slow, old flash drive, it boots incredibly quickly. However, after about 5 minutes of using it, I got bored. It’s JUST a browser. Also, despite the simplicity, it cuts my battery-life drastically. I get around 4.5 hours with Win7 RC, and about 3 hours with Diet Chromium.
It’s surprising that, so far, they’ve simply taken Linux as a building block, stripped out all the crap, and somehow make it WORSE, not better. If this is what they’re starting out with, the prospect of Google making ChromeOS into a compelling product is quite dim.
Just ran this up on my Samsung N110 – actually forgot to test the trackpad as I had a mouse connected.
As a ‘live in your browser OS’ it doesn’t come any simpler….and compared to my Samsung running Xp, 500GB HDD, VMWare Workstation, Office 2007 etc etc it has a certain appeal. An appliance I pickup, work with and turn off has shifted my thinking a little…obviously Chrome OS isn’t anywhere near ready yet but it does have me looking around at alternatives.
For those that haven’t downloaded yet, try it – 300mb and a thumbdrive.
I’ve tested this on my Acer Aspire One 110 (ZG5). It works well*, but indeed you wonder what the advantage is over a stripped down Linux distribution (for example Acer’s Linpus Linux). What has google been doing since announcing ChromeOS? Not a lot judging on this build.. They’re taking another year before releasing the final release, I hope they reach higher for that release..
*didn’t test battery life, but everything seems to work: wifi, sound, trackpad, suspend