Korean artistes... plastic has never looked better.
You can get the latest make of the Chrome/Chromium OS made by Hexxeh from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/.
There’s a way which you can try out the new Chrome OS on your netbook that has Windows on it. A bootable build by Hexxeh called Flow is a Chromium OS build that runs off a USB stick, and it emulates most of the features that Chrome has to offer – and just like Chrome, once you turn off your WiFi, you can totally throw your netbook away because it becomes useless.
Granted, I don’t think that this is the best representation of the potential Chrome can offer, but if you wanna try it out, head over here to get it.
Apps aka Bookmarks
Indeed, it really is a bootable Chrome OS, and it does boot extremely fast. Setting up was easy – there were no problems with sound output or video output – all you need to do is to setup your WiFi and then you can run Flow. Flow runs everything pretty well, from Youtube to web browsing to running Google apps. Make sure you are technically inclined, because you’ll need to do some meddling to install the Flow image onto your USB drive.
Running Flow and Seeing Chromium
Chrome OS for bloggers: prepare to go into read-only mode.
It was underwhelming to say the least. If Flow is a good yardstick of what Chromium/Chrome OS can offer, then I’ll totally forget it. There’s no reason whatsoever why you should use Chrome OS over a Windows netbook. First of all, it’s basically just a fancy bootable Chrome browser. Yes, you get a frontpage with “apps” which are basically just bookmarks. Then, if you want to do any serious photo editing, there’s no Photoshop! That means I can’t do blogging, as it involves significant photo editing at times.
Then again, there’s also the problem of… what’s so special about this? It might boot up fast, but at the cost of a lot of functionality a Windows PC has, I’d rather wait that extra 20-seconds so that I can type in Word, listen to my MP3s stored on my hard drive, play games and watch movies. Yes, no viruses here, but then again, viruses are a question of knowledge and prudence. If you are savvy enough and have a antivirus program, you’ll probably have more flu bouts in a year than the number of times you’ll get viruses.
It was fun trying this out, but I’m not going back. It failed to impress, and the loss of so much functionality is unacceptable. I’m heading back to Windows.
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