Yesterday, our (soon to be overlord) friends at Google introduced us to their new OS, Chromium. Much has been buzzing around the nerd-sphere, including much speculation about what this means for competing OS companies, what it might look like, and what changes it might encourage in the general computing world. A new kid on the block is what it is, but it isn't any kind of gorilla.

The discussions start with what their idea is. Essentially, they are taking the ideas of the way a lot of us work, binding much of it to the Internet, and wrapping it all in their Chrome browser. This model works pretty well for those that have a hard time differentiating the "Internet" from "the web." It's particularly intriguing if one takes a serious look at how much computer work they do already inside a browser, or that could be inside a browser.

Off the bat, I figured that this wouldn't work for me. While I've spent the bulk of the last dozen years or so writing software for the Internet, and heavily for the web, none of the tools I use to do that work actually function well in a browser. Sure, I can make stuff that works in a browser, but I can't make it with a browser.

Think of a baker in this weak analogy; they can make all kinds of cakes and pies and cookies, but they use bowls and spoons and ovens to make this happen. If you're an eater and not a baker, cakes and cookies and pies are all you need. In this respect, for my work anyway, I'm a baker.

How it will be used can remain to be seen. There are projects underway, such as Mozilla Bespin, that are trying to bring software development inside the browser, too. That aside, and other than piggy software (really meaning games) it's probably the case that most of what I do, too, can be pushed into a browser. This entry, for example, is written in a bit of software in a browser. I use GMail or HotMail or similar for e-mail, and their web-based clients for chat work, too ('though I'm really using Pidgin 'cause it's got 'em all). And with Google Documents or Microsoft Office Live or similar software, all of my other document handling is pretty much taken care of. For the desktop, of course (servers herein have no standing).

So, taking out the hard stuff, I can move to a browser-centric operating environment. Consider, then, a user who spends most or all of their time in the web browser. Visiting FaceBook, Twitter, NetFlix, Pandora... E-mail, chat, video, audio, and even some intense games can be delivered via browser. In the worst case, a Flash application or Java Applet, for a bigger-than-fits-in-browser software can be used.

With this all in mind, and not trying to replace anyone else's precious Windows OS, I hoped to find something fun and useful in the new OS. Buried in the news floating around is a Google Wave discussion about the new announcement, and it contains a link to a "disk image" that works inside a Sun VirtualBox (it's free, too) virtual machine. I found an installation guide that plots out the steps to take to get it running, assuming you have VirtualBox installed and download the image. It has a link to a Torrent of the same disk image as the Wave had (or so it seems on first glance...yeah, I got 'em both and did a quickie check...such a nerd).

Those links also contain screen-shots, so I'll skip the pretty pictures and wrap up with a quick discussion of how to get it going. When the virtual machine is configured correctly and started, the initial login is presented in almost as much time as it takes for the VirtualBox splash screen to fade away. I didn't time it, but seat-of-the-pants says that it's in the realm of seconds. The disk image is built with a screen size of 800x600 pixels (remember the computer you had before the computer you had before the one you have now? The one from the really early 1990s? Yeah, not that big...), which took up a pretty tiny bit of my laptop's generous display. After some casual experimentation and Googling I was unable to find a trick to improve the resolution.

I checked the Wave and other article and didn't see any explicit direction, but it pretty quickly becomes apparent that the login is just a Google account (GMail worked fine). After just about as long as it took to boot, a full-screen (think kiosk-mode as it had no frame or title bar) Chrome browser appeared. There were three tabs with icons, one Google, one GMail, and one Google Calendar, as well as a fourth "new tab."

The first, the one with the Google tab was again asking me for my name and password. Two moments of reading the screen pointed out that this was actually for "Google Short Links" (which I'd not heard of), and has a warning that it's not affiliated with Google. This is a little weird, I decided, so I skipped that tab for now.

Bonking the mail tab icon, I was rewarded with my normal GMail interface, theme and all. Similarly, bonking the calendar icon brought me my Google Calendar. Neither of these tabs seems to have a way to close them. Additionally, typing a URl in the address bar presented on these tabs always opens a new tab, even if it's to another Google site. Other than that slight annoyance (of always having three tabs open instead of the one iGoogle page), it seemed functional.

The browser worked as expected. I visited my sites, my company's sites, FaceBook, Twitter, and a bunch of other sites I'd normally visit. There's no ad-blocker (like I recommend to all Firefox users), and despite the happy "there's new extensions" announcement on the bottom, there aren't any new extensions available...

Hitting Alt + Ctrl + T pops open a shell prompt (use the password chromeos if you use sodu to do things as root). This gives a little more geek probing ground. A few minutes poking around shows that it is indeed Linux under a browser, from the straight-up boot, through the use of xorg and GTK for graphics. In the /etc folder we can see a small (most of the common files are there, but many are zero-bytes long) feature set of the usual suspects. There's no hidden sendmail (or other MTA), or other sneaky servers. Just what it needs to have a browser.

I spent a few minutes trying to change the resolution, but with no success. Evidently there's something in the driver or root configuration that is locking it to a choice of 640x480 or 800x600, of which I'm glad it picked the larger... I've got the source, and through the poking around on the web (much from inside the virtual machine), I've got a good idea on what it takes to make the package and end up with a VirtualBox image of my own. I'm going to give that a whirl, if for no other reason than to try to pop up the resolution a screen size or few.

After having it running for a few hours (it's giving me my Google view now, instead of my normal tabs in this Firefox on my Ubuntu desktop), I'd say it's definitely a web browser sitting on top of the bare minimum of what it needs to run. It runs well enough as a second virtual machine running on my Ubuntu host. I can see it meeting the needs of plenty of people I've run into, especially those that think browsing the Internet is computing.

Of course, as expected, I'll probably be sticking with full on Linux or Solaris for my needs. If for no other reason than to have the tools necessary to build the applications which will run on Chromium.