Is Chrome OS just another Ubuntu fork?

Matt — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:38:55 +0000

Officially Chrome OS is following the same versioning trend as Chrome browser. The tarball packed chromium source that was initially released for everyone to build Chrome OS from scratch was 0.4.22.8 and the dev channel (nightly builds) Chrome browser is 4.0.249.11 (as of this writing). But Chrome OS user-string reveals a bit more about the current OS version. I am sure you can get the same information by checking out the source but this is a less time consuming way to find out.

Chrome Browser dev channel user-agent string under Windows 7:

Operating System:    Macintosh WinNT

Browser:             Safari 1.3


                     Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.11 Safari/532.5

Chrome OS user-agent string:

Operating System:    Macintosh UNIX

Browser:             Safari 1.3


                     Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5

Even though the Chrome browser running on Chrome OS seems to be dev builds of the browser, the underlying OS identifies itself as CrOS i686 9.10.0, or more specifically version 9.10. This might have something to do with the fact that Ubuntu developers have been privately working with Google on Chrome OS way before it was officially announced in July 2009.

Taking these information into consideration I think it is safe to conclude that, under the hood, Chrome OS is nothing more than a stripped and dumbed down version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala with Chrome browser acting as a light-weight desktop environment (similar to XFCE or xubuntu).

First Look at Google Chrome OS

Pavs — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:06:21 +0000

Today Google officially revealed its much talked about OS to the general public. Its not an official release yet and much will be changed in terms of UI and more featured will be added as it gets an official release sometime one year for now. For the time being the project and its source has been opened up to everyone to that developers can contribute to the project. As some of you might now, Google Chrome OS relies on Linux kernel and this will without doubt give a big boost to Linux kernel and all the OS and applications that depend on it. It is fair to say that this is the single most important news for Linux. The advertising and developers muscle of Google is likely to take Chrome OS and Linux a long way forward.

Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that depends on a lot of open-source software like Host AP Linux drivers, PAM, Syslinux, IBus, ConnMan, XScreenSaver.

Geek Technica » Chrome OS

Is Chrome OS just another Ubuntu fork?

First Look at Google Chrome OS