look out honey 'cause I'm using technology

HOWTO run Chromium OS on a Dell Mini 9 with wifi

chrome-icon-200x200UPDATE: I’m now running the latest build of Hexxeh’s Chrome OS named Flow – and everything just works out of the box.  The release is much improved, and it’s getting very close to being the perfect day-to-day netbook OS as far as I’m concerned.  Great work!

While I still really dig my Dell Mini 9, even with 2Gig of RAM it feels kinda sluggish when I have my normal 50 tabs open, and I’ve always known someone could do better (since I’m too lazy to recompile a kernel for it like I would have in the past).  With all the focus on netbooks it was bound to be addressed, and while Android looks promising, it’s currently still more of a phone OS than something you’d be able to use on your netbook.  I’ve run it off a USB drive on the Mini 9 just to check it out, it was cool, but again, not really usable enough for a ‘top – maybe that’s not the target. Another I want to check is Moblin, Intel’s effort using Ubuntu as a base, but I haven’t seen a Mini 9 HOWTO (maybe I’ll have to write my own…) for that.  So, enter Google Chrome OS, Google’s idea of how to not only address this problem, but perhaps lay out how we will use these computers in the future.  It’s always funny when I start talking about cloud and thin clients, it takes me back to dumb terminals talking to mainframes, but I digress. The point is, thanks to great posts at jasongriffey.net and Lifehacker, it’s really easy to install Google’s Chrome OS on a Dell Mini 9, the only thing I really have to add is that you have to use ChromeOS Zero from the hexxeh.net site. After all, this is an open source project, so folks are going to make changes/fix things and share with everyone. Looking at the site they had a new release, yesterday (gotta love it!) The last time I tried a build the wifi on my Mini just worked, so it looks like those problems are a thing of the past.



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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 3:48 am and is filed under featured, geek, headline, linux and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

    
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  • matt1912
    More of a question than a comment: Would you suggest this is a good idea for netbooks with 1GB of ram as well. I will entertain any option that gets me off Windows 7 Starter. It's is petty,I know, but you cant change the wallpaper on your desktop. Its like buying a "Car" and not being able to use the windshield wipers without getting the "Deluxe Car". I assumed too much I suppose.
  • I have 2Gig on this laptop, but 1Gig should be fine for either Chrome OS or Moblin. I would do a dual boot to keep your 7 partition until you know you don't need/want it. The great thing about this OSs is that they're very new, so improvements are happening daily, so what didn't work last month/week could be worth a try again now. I'm going to reload Chrome soon, I like where they're going, but look forward to a proper Moblin release to try out too.
  • I have 2Gig on this laptop, but 1Gig should be fine for either Chrome OS or Moblin. I would do a dual boot to keep your 7 partition until you know you don't need/want it. The great thing about this OSs is that they're very new, so improvements are happening daily, so what didn't work last month/week could be worth a try again now. I'm going to reload Chrome soon, I like where they're going, but look forward to a proper Moblin release to try out too.
  • I have 2Gig on this laptop, but 1Gig should be fine for either Chrome OS or Moblin. I would do a dual boot to keep your 7 partition until you know you don't need/want it. The great thing about this OSs is that they're very new, so improvements are happening daily, so what didn't work last month/week could be worth a try again now. I'm going to reload Chrome soon, I like where they're going, but look forward to a proper Moblin release to try out too.
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