Hasta La Gadget!

Nobody knows exactly what Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS will look or act like, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of what they’re going for. Here’s how to live out Google’s online-only OS vision, right now

Before we dive in, it’s worth talking about exactly what we’re going for here. What “theory of Chrome” are we planning to adhere to? Or perhaps more to the point, what the hell is Chrome? From Google:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks” and “most of the user experience takes place on the web.” That is, it’s “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel” with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors (like your standard Core 2 Duo) and ARM processors (like inside every mobile smartphone). Underneath lies security architecture that’s completely redesigned to be virus-resistant and easy to update.

From our own Matt Buchanan:

If I had to guess, I’d say Chrome OS is somewhere in between an entirely browser-based OS and a generic Linux distro, though leaning toward the former.

In other words, Chrome, as we understand it, and as Google describes it, is a Linux OS that lives on the web, depending almost entirely on Google’s suite of services, which are served through a special, Google-designed interface. We have no way of knowing what this mysterious window manager, menu system or desktop environment will look like, so we can’t replicate that. The web half of Chrome OS, though, is already in place, and ready for us to clumsily unify. So, we’ll make our own stripped-down operating system. Here’s how:

Get Yourself Some Linux
Before embarking on this goofy afternoon software project, we need a launchpad. Specifically: Linux. You could go with almost any distro and accomplish the same effect, but this guide will be focused on a distribution called Xubuntu. Why Xubuntu? Because it strike a perfect balance between being extremely compatible and easy to install—on both counts, it really is—and, since it’s essentially just a version of the uber-popular Ubuntu Linux distro with a stripped-down, super-fast desktop environment called XFCE, it’s quick, and lightweight. Anyway, head over the the Xubuntu website and start downloading. (Go with 9.04 the latest stable version.)

There are a few ways to handle this. If you’re planning to install Xubuntu on a netbook—Chrome’s first and most natural target—you’re probably going to need to create a bootable flash drive. Ubuntu provides some fairly fantastic instructions for doing this on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. If you’re trying to do this on a regular laptop or desktop, or you have an external optical drive, you’re going to want to burn your downloaded ISO to a CD and install from there. Alternately, you can order a free install disc from Xubuntu. Lastly, if you’re like me, and you just want to test this out in a free virtual machine like VirtualBox, all you need to do is boot a new system from your downloaded ISO. At any rate:

During the installation, you’ll be prompted with a number of options. Make sure to check the “Log In Automatically” radio box—it’ll make your boot-to-browser experience a little smoother later on.

Once you’ve finished the installation—this should take no more than a half-hour, really—you’ll find yourself with a pretty, fresh new Xubuntu desktop. It’s really nice! But now, it’s time to start replacing it.

Choose Your Browser
So obviously, you’ll need a browser. This is the center of the Chrome experience—the window through which you’ll access Google’s suite of services, and which you may never leave. It needs to have support for all the web’s various technologies, be it Google Gears—a plugin that lets Google services store data offline, so they can load faster and function offline—or Flash, which makes the internet significantly less boring. Chrome OS will ship with Google’s Chrome browser, obviously, but the Linux port is a little sickly right now. Gears, for example, doesn’t really work right now, and Flash, though technically available, crashes constantly. But if you really want to stay as Googly as possible on this project, you can get Chrome for Linux (Chromium, it’s called) by adding these lines to the “Sources” list in a program called Synaptic, which manages Linux applications through one, unified interface, and is accessible in your System menu.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

You can find out how to enable Flash here. Pro tip: don’t bother with this.

Counterintuitively, the best way to get the Google experience on Linux is with Firefox. Xubuntu comes with Firefox, but you’re going to need to spruce it up a little. Ok, a lot.

Make That Browser Work
First, you’ll need Flash. Open Synaptic—mentioned above—from your Applications>System menu, and search for an item called “Flashplugin,” (it’s Flash Player 10) or navigate to the item as shown in the below screenshot.
Click “Apply” and let the installer run its course. Now, Firefox should support sites like YouTube, Pandora, et al.

Now, you’ll need Google Gears. This is a simple Firefox extension, which you can download here. This’ll help make living online feel a little less like, you know, living online—think offline archived email. Most of Google services can use Gears, so you’ll want to go through each site’s settings page to enable as many “Gears” or “Offline Access” options as possible. Docs and Mail are where you’ll see the biggest differences, since Gears turns them from web services into full-fledged offline apps, transparently. Pretty amazing stuff, and one of the few features we know will be in Chrome OS.

Next, you’ll need the Google Toolbar. This, in absence of whatever interface voodoo Google is sitting on, will serve as a sort of constant dashboard for Google services in the meantime. Along with providing shortcuts and notifiers for services like Gmail and Googel Caldner, it’s got a few little tricks that’ll make your browser feel more like a proper OS. For example: in the Google Toolbar preferences, you can check options that enable both automatic Gmail-ing or Mailto: links, and automatic opening of many document formats in Google Docs. You’ll want to enable these, since we’re trying to create the illusion that the rest of the OS doesn’t exist, which an errant OpenOffice window or email client could shatter, God forbid.

Lastly, grab yourself a copy of an extension called Speed Dial, which will give you a Grid-based homepage of favorites which you can populate with all the core Google Services you’re going to need—Gmail, Reader, Google Docs, Google News, etc—and which will be the first thing you see when you open your browser, and eventually, your OS. Set the initial configuration as I have on the left.

And if you’re really into this idea for some reason, you can download a Firefox skin that looks like Google Chrome here.

Getting Rid of Everything Else
Now that you’ve got everything you need to live wholly within Google’s ecosystem, a la Chrome OS, you need to remove everything else—that means excess browser clutter, system menus, and pretty much anything else that stands between you and your Google suite.

The first step will be to strip out your Firefox interface, which is probably looking a bit bloated by now. I’ve posted my small-screened solution below, which you can replicate by dragging and dropping icons however you please in Firefox’s View>Toolbars>Customize menu. The above configuration lets you totally remove the Bookmarks and Navigation bars, which saves a good deal of space. Feel free to play with this for a while—you might find that you don’t need one input box or the other, or that you can get away with much less of an interface than I have.

After grinding down Firefox’s interface to an acceptable size, you’ll need to go to work on your desktop. Before you can kill all the menu bars and shortcuts you don’t need, you’ll need to make sure Firefox automatically loads at startup, so you’re basically booting into the browser. You can do this by navigating to Applications>Settings>Session and Startup, and adding a new startup item with the values seen below. (The last one if the only one you can’t change—it’s the one that launches Firefox).

Now, it’s time to murder everything else. Right-click on either the top or bottom system panels—the Start Menu-like things on the top and bottom of your desktop—and click “Customize Panel.” From here, you can remove the top panel, and set the bottom panel to “autohide.” Once you’re done, restart. Upon boot-up, this is about all you should see:
Welcome to Chrome! Kind of!

See What You Think
As I said before, what you’ve just slapped together here is not Chrome, and Google’s final product will probably look nothing like this, superficially. But this little web-savvy Frankenstein OS does, I think, capture something of Google long-term vision, in which everything we store, use and experience on our computer is based online—preferably on their servers—and native applications are nothing more than a small, necessary evil. This experiment is less about guessing the specifics of Chrome OSes interface, under-the-hood workings or usage model (three things which I’m fairly sure this fails at) than it is about deciding whether or not the the idea of Chrome OS suits you, and how you use your computer. That, at least, you can get a taste of. So, how do you like it?

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your OS impersonation, and have a great weekend!

PieLab | We’re Open from The Office of PlayLab, Inc. on Vimeo.

Iconoculture: Pie Lab — a pop-up dessert shop in Greensboro, Alabama — serves pie, with a little hope on the side. Hale County, where Greensboro is located, is one of the poorest counties in America and it still struggles with deep-seeded racial divides. The organizers of Pie Lab hope to create a neutral space where folks can visit — and begin to heal.

The small shop was founded by two non-profit groups, Project M (a group of designers, writers and photographers who apply their talents to the greater good) and Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization (an organization that helps families in Hale County).

Pie Lab’s tiny menu includes two types of pie (chocolate bourbon pecan and apple were recent offerings), coffee, lemonade and milk.

Pie power: Creating community through dessert [Iconoculture]

Laird Hamilton is as tech savvy as surfers get. He knows that the gear that takes him into danger also helps him out of it. Here’s a harrowing tale of surfing terror and the jet ski that saved a life:

The most commonly asked question I get is, what was the scariest wave I ever took? I used to get rescued probably three or four times a week when I was a kid, before I was five or six years old. I was known to be lost at sea, out in the ocean. The lifeguard used to come to my mom’s house and say “Laird’s out in the rip again.” She’d be like “No he’s not, he’s in his room napping.” And they’d be like “No, he’s out in the rip again.” They’d get sick of rescuing me, so they finally said, “Hey Laird, we gotta fix that.” My point is I’ve had a lot of extremely scary moments growing up as a young kid and young person.

There’s been a ton between then and now, but the most recent was one of the scariest things that’s ever happened to me and hopefully ever will. It was two years ago, on December 3. A friend and I were out in surf that was over 100 feet—well over a 100 feet—and I had dived off on a wave that might as well have been 100 or 200. I don’t know—at that point I didn’t have my tape measure—but it demanded every bit of my experience and strength. I came up to the back of it, and my friend who was on the back of the wave grabbed me with the jet ski.

We proceeded to try to run away from the next wave and got run down from behind by one of the biggest waves that I have ever seen. It was definitely the biggest wave to ever run me down from behind.

We were dragged an incredible distance underwater, anywhere from a third to a half a mile, I would say. I came up from a depth that I haven’t been down at on a wave before, and just got a breath and got hit by another one. I saw my friend and we got pushed in by probably four more, each one smaller. Finally we were pushed all the way to the inside.

My friend was severely cut and needed a tourniquet. All I had was a wet suit so I used my wetsuit to tourniquet his leg. And then I made a decision: If I didn’t swim for the jet ski that was about a quarter to half mile from us, he was going to die and I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it. I had to make a decision to leave him and swim to a jet ski and get back. It’s a close friend of mine. We both have daughters the same age and are best friends.

I got there and the jet ski was running. Had it not been running, I don’t know what would have happened. He might have bled out or whatever. But because it ran, I was like, “OK, saved by the ski!” You know?

I think that the fear of his death probably scared me worse than anything I’ve ever had happen to myself because obviously, when it’s happening to you, you’re not thinking about how bad it is, you’re just dealing with it. When it’s happening to somebody else—especially someone that you care about—that’s a lot worse. So the fact that he was good and I didn’t have to explain… that he made it, and I didn’t have to tell his family why he didn’t come home that day, that was a great thing. The dead aren’t worried about dying, it’s only the people alive, left here thinking about it, who are. It’s a lot harder on them than it is on the people who have died.

Laird Hamilton has been a surfing hero since the 1980s, solidifying his reputation as the king of big wave surfing when he conquered Tahiti’s Teahupo’o Reef at its most perilous in August 2000. As an innovator, he pioneered many new activities including kitesurfing, tow-in surfing and hydrofoil boarding. He’s on the board of directors at H2O Audio, makers of pro-level waterproof iPhone and iPod cases, and has his own signature line of Surge waterproof earphones, proceeds of which are donated to the Beautiful Son foundation for autism education.

Too busy following all that talk of death panels this week to follow the talk of flat panels? Here’s some of what you missed on Crave.

• Dong Ngo offered some compelling reasons to move to the 64-bit version of Windows.

• The Zune HD basked in its touch-screen …

It’s the phone that Nokia should’ve used to introduce the world to Symbian S60 5th edition, but is it the “hero”-type device that it was marketed as? Nokia’s N97 is undoubtedly expensive, debatably beautiful and thoroughly polarizing (as two of our own found out). While it’s impossible to say the handset was introduced to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone (the whole “only sold off contract” thing kind of hampers that), there’s little doubt that this phone was Espoo’s most significant attempt yet to make a name for itself in the full-touchscreen smartphone market. If you handed over the handful of C-notes required to take this bad boy home, why not tell us exactly how you feel now that you’re an owner? What would you like to see changed on Nokia’s next attempt? What measures up? What falls short? You’ve got one shot (maybe two, depending on the mood of our comment system) — don’t screw it up.

Filed under: Cellphones

How would you change Nokia’s N97? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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