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I am going to try something new. I have some Buckethead music glaring, a whole season of My Name is Earl just came in on DVD, and I have some spare cycles to burn. What does that mean for you? It means I am going to go through these instructions and try to install Chrome OS and give it a look see.

I have decided to do this as a quasi-live blog and give all of the appropriate comments and growing pains inline as I discover them. Enjoy!

Getting Started

4:00PM, Thursday, November 19th

My test platform is my trusty 17” Unibody Macbook Pro. It’s got a 2.8Ghz Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hard drive, Snow Leopard OS, and most importantly for this exercise, VMware Fusion 3.0.

The first part of the adventure is getting a platform to install it on. If you read my blog you are aware that I am a Fedora man when it comes to Linux. Unfortunately for me, Google seems to have a thing for Ubuntu, so I am downloading Ubuntu 9.10 from Ubuntu.com as my build platform. I’ll be installing it into a Virtual Machine on the Mac. (Unless there is something I don’t know about, I should be able to host the VM and share it when I am done, I’ll check on that.)

4:16PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ubuntu may be slow downloading (70%), but Buckethead is wailing. If you like guitar music and haven’t heard him, check out the album Giant Robot, right now the song “Want some Slaw?” This guy is too good, a shame he’s absolutely nuts. Oh, and even though we are talking about Google and Apple so far, you should get ZunePass from Microsoft and get your own Buckethead fix going!

4:26PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ubuntu is downloaded, I started the new Virtual Machine wizard, increased the default RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB, and started the install.

4:35PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ok, Ubuntu is installed. Let’s check all the prerequisites and make sure we can build this sucker. On a related note, that’s only 9 minutes to install. Considering that it’s a completely functional OS with productivity software, communication software and all the basic tools you need to function on the internet, that’s not too shabby. Once it reboots we’ll set a root password and update everything.

The list is pretty long, lucky for us they have a simple apt command that has all of them in one batch, run:

$ sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ g++-multilib \
 bison flex gperf libnss3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr4-0d libasound2-dev \
 libnspr4-dev msttcorefonts libgconf2-dev libcairo2-dev libdbus-1-dev

That’s a lot of junk getting installed at once, but it only took about 5 minutes to complete.

Let’s Get Some Source Code!

4:49PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ok, Ubuntu is happy, now we need to download some code. I am choosing not to go the git route as I have no intention to change or check in code. I am downloading the tarball of the code and it clocks in at 232MB.

Started the compile, let’s see how long this thing takes to build.

5:31PM, Thursday, November 19th

Still building. It’s been going for almost an hour. I still have more building to do when this script finishes. Woohah..

5:46PM, Thursday, November 19th

Build finished, can’t seem to get the system to enter chroot so I can start the next part of the build process. Taking a break for some TERYAKI!!!

8:30PM, Thursday, November 19th

Well, I am chroot blocked. I can’t get this sucker to finish building. I am calling it a night on this front, but I’ll give it another shot tomorrow. Please leave suggestions in the comments if you have seen this symptom:

When I run the enter_chroot.sh script, it says it mounted chroot, then immediately unmounted chroot. Thoughts?

Stay tuned for more adventures installing Google Chrome OS

I am being honest when I say that I want Ubuntu and the Linux movement to get it. When I read articles like this one posted on CNET.com this week, I kind of chuckle at first, then reality sets in and I feel sorry for them.

Renai LeMay makes some huge claims in the article. Several of them I don’t have any problem with, such as Ubuntu being snappy and performant, it definitely is. He runs it on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram, a 7200rpm disk and a GeForce 8800GTS video card. I am sure it runs it fantastically well. But I do have a few beefs. First of all, to mock Steve Jobs repurposing of an old Mark Twain quote, “The reports of Vista’s performance problems have been greatly exaggerated.”

I’ll give you that there were some hardware issues and quirks pre Service Pack 1, but after a little bit to settle, it’s just fine now. I helped a friend upgrade a laptop with a 2Ghz AMD processor, 2GB of ram, 7600 series video and a 5400 rpm hard drive, and it ran Vista and Office 2007 just fine.

So taking performance out of the equation for now, and the unrealistic expectations that you should be able to run a next-gen Operating System, the issue is the quote that it’s just as slick as OS X and Windows 7. Of course Windows 7 and OS X Leopard are locked in their own battle for desktop slickness, but seriously, the drab brown Gnome based UI of Ubuntu looks like a JV attempt at UI design or a Sepia copy of a 10 year old Windows desktop.

I don’t mean to be rude, but this desktop looks exactly like it did when I started playing with Ubuntu over three years ago. Sure, the wallpaper is slightly changed, but if I were to grab a screenshot from my blog, dated September 2007, take a look:

Wow, um, I know you tidied a few things up in the package management and stuff, but where is any evolution of the desktop? I am going to clue the Linux community into the worst kept secret in human history… People like shiny glossy things. My previous post about Operating System color theory was just the beginning. Things have to pop, zing, and shine. People expect transparencies, drop shadows, fade in, fade out, shrink, grow, etc. Ubuntu has none of these things out of the box. Sure, you can tweak it to your heart’s content, but let’s get real, this is about first impressions.

I have seen some fantastic Linux desktops, but I have yet to see one in a default install. Why would Ubuntu be so ignorant to this fact? Let’s look at Ubuntu from versions 4 through 8.

That’s 5 years of development and improvements. Now seriously, from  2004 to 2009 what do you see if you don’t count the different wallpaper?

Let’s just make it clear. Ubuntu is not slick. It looks like what it is, essentially freeware, which has the general reputation of being out of date. It’s stable, usable and a legitimate operating system for sure. But it’s stuck in Windows 95 era design.

I hope the figure it out. Brown isn’t trendy and cool. Spartan retro looking operating systems aren’t going to win over users, and the majority of computer sales are made by a showroom impression. If you were to stick a default Ubuntu desktop beside a new Mac and a Windows Vista or 7 computer, you will quickly understand why Linux is not making progress on the desktop.

I keep myself up to date on what’s going on with Linux, I think it’s a topic I should be knowledgeable on. When I popped open the latest Ubuntu build I had to ask myself the same exact question I have been asking for years. People want the OS to look sleek and sexy. When is orange-brown ever going to be sexy? I say never.