trying to check out the new Chromium OS from Google

Well, I saw the webcast of Google's announcement of ChromeOS today.  I have to say, I was impressed.  Since the release of Chrome, I have been relying on web apps more and more.  Simply put, they are faster in Chrome than native apps under VectorLinux.  Vector is fast, that's why I use it.  But, I am easily impressed by speed.  I was instantly interested in something that claimed to be fast.  I just had to try out ChromeOS.

EDIT:  As of right now, ChromiumOS does not successfully run in Qemu.  You can download and install binaries of Sun's VirtualBox here.


The initial alpha release is by the Chromium Project and named ChromiumOS. Vector has Qemu in the repository, I like using apps already in the repo. I have installed other virtual machines but not on the currant machine.  Rather than going through my notes here and here, I chose to simply install Qemu. Qemu of course needs KQemu in order to run with any kinda real speed, so, I had to install kqemu.  That required a SlackBuild from Connie's Slackware site. You will need the following files:


http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/qemu/build/50-kqemu.rules.new
http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/qemu/build/kqemu.SlackBuild
http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/qemu/build/kqemu-1.4.0pre1.tar.gz
http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/qemu/build/kqemu.slack-desc


Qemu has to be installed first.  Then chmod 755 kqemu.SlackBuild.  Once The new package was built, I installed it with:
installpkg kqemu-1.4.0pre1_2.6.27.7_smp-i486-2alien.tgz


modprobe kqemu


Now, trying to run qemu finds that /dev/kqemu is not accessible due to permissions.  I used a dirty hack to get instant access to the device:


chown user1:user1 /dev/kqemu


Better to add $USER to the kqemu group, I think.  Just didn't want to spend the research to figure it out.  Once done, I was able to boot the vmdk image i got from here.  Running:

bunzip2 chromiumos.vmdk.bz2

will expand the archive. I found this page useful for setting up and running a virtual machine in VirtualBox.

 I looked at the QuickStart guide for Qemu to find out the best way to boot the image.  After reading that page I came up with the following command.  I saved it as a shell script:


qemu -hda chromiumos.vmdk -m 1024 -soundhw sb16 -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -net user

The root login for this particular image is: chrome.  The regular user login is your Google login.  My Google login is actually my Yahoo email addy, I found that if you don't include the entire email addy, ChromeOS will fill in with "@gmail.com"  So it is important to use your entire email addy.  Here are screenshots I captured during my experience:

EDIT:  I installed Sun's VirtualBox and writing this edit from ChromiumOS.  I'll post some new screenshots in a lil bit.

ChromiumOS running in Qemu...

Please remember this is while running in Qemu... first try!  I will continue working with ChromiumOS in Qemu until I get the video issue worked out.  My VM is using   -m 1024, the host machine is an intel P4 @ 2.0 GHz running VectorLinux Standard Gold 6.0.

You can find the webcast I reviewed here:

Another web video of ChromiumOS's fast boot capabilities here: