A lot has already been said about Google’s Chrome OS. I think it’s pretty funny that Google announced their Chrome OS just before Microsoft’s PDC. Guess Redmond execs are going to get a different kind of questions than they were preparing for.
Looking at the currently available information I’m not impressed. After all it’s just Linux 2.6 with a new Window Manager. I like the subtle change of Ina Fried’s take to “to challenge Microsoft, Google might want to think Apple”. With it’s appeal to the Open Source Community Chrome OS seems to be a product for techies by techies. Nothing wrong with that but Chromes OS needs a WOW factor. Something that the iPod, iPhone and MacBook Air all had. Where are the screencasts and pics? Where’s the OS?
The thing is the Chrome OS probably competes more with existing Linux distributions than with the products from Redmond (or Apple). Renai LeMay thinks that Google should have based their work on Ubuntu’s stellar work already carried out by Shuttleworth. Off course Renai is totally wrong. Ubuntu & Shuttleworth mostly leech on the stellar work done by others: primarily the Fedora and Debian Communities and commercial backers like Red Hat which probably employs more kernel hackers than Canonical’s total global workforce. Canonical’s marketing is great but their contributions back to the Community are negligible. So if you want Google to work with a distribution than Ubuntu just isn’t an option. It makes more sense to align with Fedora and cut a Desktop deal with Red Hat.
Fedora 12 will come with another cool new feature: poly instantiated tmp directories. Read more here.
Dan Williams of NetworkManager fame wrote on his blog that NetworkManager no longer requires HAL. The HAL website says HAL is in maintenance mode with development focus shifted to DeviceKit and other libs/apps. Seems HAL is on its way out.
What’s more important to me are the new features that are in the pipeline. Things like ModemManager, System-wide Configuration and IPv6 are great steps forward and will make networking in Gnome even more pain-free than it already is.
I also hope that the GUI of the NetworkManager applet will get some TLC. It doesn’t make sense to have a 50 item list of detected Wireless networks with the one I’m using hidden in there. The long list of detected Wireless networks makes it also too elaborate to get to the VPN Connections menu as you have to scroll all the way down. I hope to see a revamped GUI where the Wired and/or Wireless and/or VPN Connection in-use are at the top with a collapsed list of VPN Connections and detected Wireless networks below that.
Over at CNET Dennis O’Reilly reports that the Windows Search Service on his Vista PC tried to change the default search setting from Google to Bing. Fortunately Google Toolbar noticed the change and alerted Dennis of the attempted change.
Changing a setting chosen by the user and without so much as asking the user if changing that setting is ok just to draw more traffic to a competing search engine is highly questionable. I hope the European Commission takes notice.
Seems Drivel finally bit the dust with its removal from the Fedora repos. I did like Drivel when it worked. Alas, parting is such sweet sorrow. So Lekhonee to the rescue. I read about it before but thought it was a KDE app which is no good to me. Fortunately I was wrong as there is a Gnome version. So I installed it with a simple “yum install lekhonee-gnome” and it seems to work as advertised. Nice one Kushal!