New Chromium OS build brings full NVIDIA Ion acceleration, hope for the future
By Darren Murph 
posted February 19th 2010 4:03PM
posted February 19th 2010 4:03PM
Chrome OS. Man, seems like Google has gotten its hands into quite a few things since we last heard of that, but the underground is keeping things lively with new builds of Chromium OS -- you know, to keep us satisfied while we wait for the real deal. Hexxeh has just unleashed its latest build, dubbed Flow, which makes a few critical improvements, particularly if you're planning to install the system onto an Ion-based rig. Flow includes full NVIDIA Ion acceleration, and it also "improves battery life" while making the automatic update... um, work. Hit that source link to get your download on, and if you've been holding out for fear of trying something new, you've got your whole weekend to fix things should things go terribly awry.[Thanks, Amrita]
it's hexxeh, not hexxah :)
@frysee +1
I want to see this on a nice iPad replacement asap! It would be a tablet that actually isn't full of fail, and OMG supports flash?
@treats
There goes that battery life improvement!
looks like the perfect OS for my future HP slate.
@treats I would rather see someone working on a media center using this one...
@Appleman u guys really swallow it all dont you? apple fans are the dream followers of any corporate company...
@treats Facts: "what if your browser was your operating system. new OS no kernel, no all.... BIOS was redesigned?" It's like they made a mobile OS and applied in a desktop computer. See the Chromium review: http://bit.ly/google-chrome-os-best-or-worst-judge-it
I wouldn't be able to install this on my desktop, would I? I mean, does it only support netbook internals?
@Benjulious
It's very strict about the hardware it runs on. I think there's a spreadsheet somewhere.
To answer your question, no it won't run on your desktop [unless via virtual machine]
@Benjulious I've been working hard to get this working on a wider set of hardware, funnily enough, I did the nVidia testing on my desktop. If you're using nVidia graphics on your desktop and they're fairly recent, chances are it'll probably run fine speed wise. Networking is another matter, though.
I'm wondering if this is legal, since IIRC nVidia does not like their official Linux driver being distributed without a license agreement...
I'd guess Google got a liscense!
@grindboy Google haven't done anything on nVidia yet, so I did instead. We could kill the files we're hosting and just provide instructions to get the support working, if nVidia requests we do so. It'd be a shame, of course.
Hmm... I'll probably test this on a virtual machine. Looks like a cool OS.
Can't wait to see what Chrome OS leads to. This is the lightweight, portable os that has my eye....
I bet it can even run flash!
able to play back mkv files?
and once that is released thats the nail in the coffin of privacy...
@Mr w00t Like you had any shred of privacy before? Face it, someone could learn anything they want about you if they really wanted even without google.
@Mr w00t
Well, it's not like anyone is forcing you to install this OS. It's up to you.
It's not just Ion, it runs great on my desktop with an 8800GTS even with HD iPlayer/YouTube.
Previously Chromium OS was unusable without nvidia drivers
Nice job Hexxeh! Now if only Chromium OS had some kind of offline mode (can't even write notes now, unless you go into vim :)
Impressive work this 17yo kid is doing. Keep up the good job boy!
I would love to try this on my Acer Revo, and by "would love to" I mean "am going to". It's got the same guts as an Aspire and it has the Nvidia ion. I just hope that it having a lan connection instead of wifi doesn't mess things up.
@baltwade It works great, a Revo was one of the machines we tested on before release. We noted that even the HDMI out works. ;)
@Hexxeh Thanks so much for your work. I had no problem booting up the ChromeOS on my Revo from a thumb drive. Matter of fact, I'm on it right now.
Workin' perfect on this Ion spec'd HP Mini 311. Thanks Hexxeh!
i'd like to see chromium os + boxee = ultimate netbook os.
I got an older one to work but this one is giving me grief, the image file (after several downloads) keeps on saying its corrupt and now the VMWare image running in Sun VirtualBox just has a blank black screen, what's going wrong??
@Cheesestring13 VirtualBox isn't supported, just get VMWare Player, free.
@Hexxeh Works a treat Thanks!
But when following the instructions to boot from USB, two different drives (both tried twice) give "Fatal Error, no bootable media" any help with that?
Thanks Again :)
I tried it on my netbook today. It worked great and had me surfing the web almost instantly. It's not enough for what I need out of my netbook, though, so I didn't stick with it.
If you ask me Google is going to one up Apple but not being lazy (using there IPhone OS for a tablet) and actually designing an OS from scratch-ish to use on such a device with more kick ass powers that does not suck. I would love to see this morph into a Google takeover of netbook OS from microsoft eventually.