Google Chrome OS on DT366

This board posts about running linux on your webdt366
sunnyvoip
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Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by sunnyvoip »

Is it possible to port Google Chrome OS to DT366 Tablet PC?
quotaholic
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by quotaholic »

Not to be negative but I wouldnt hold my breath. On Slackware I tried to use google earth. First it wouldnt install because of a screen resolution problem. It wanted 1074x768 minimum. After forcing it I waited ten minutes for the app to open. It was unusable once it did. Knowing that this is a platform for googles offerings I think they would be concerned about user experience enough to build this for a more modern platform.

Could one dial in to and control a pc running chrome os? Possibly a different story. Google often uses open source tools to make  their offerings however will the finished product (one year away) still resemble a linux that we can associate a package manager to or install penmount drivers in to? Have to wait and see.
serialjoepsycho
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by serialjoepsycho »

I doubt it'll look like linux but I'm certain almost that they will have some sort of package management. if google wants to do anything on the market they are going to have to do something so a broad range of computers can use it. To do that they'll need alot of drivers.
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by quotaholic »

I suggest a feature request to the ubuntu team for dt366 support.

Based on this quote:
If you're running an older Linux release, your version of debootstrap may not be able to install the newer Karmic version of Ubuntu that we use to build Chromium OS. If making the local repository or the chroot fails, here's a workaround that installs the Karmic version
Taken from here:
http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions

It builds on Karmic. Karmic on a minimal install is 437mb before xorg or any gui at all. Karmic has no penmount support currently and I am not sure if it will install on a DT360. Jaunty did install on a DT360 as long as you were very careful about space. The DT366 is as far as I know unsupported by ubuntu. I submitted a bug six months ago to the launchpad team and they told me that the hardware was no longer supported.
Last edited by quotaholic on Mon Dec 07, 2009 5:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by quotaholic »

The last a bunch of us here tried we could not get ubuntu to install on a dt366. If you are successful please let us know what you did to make it happen.
casm
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by casm »

I've had some thus-far moderate success with running ChromiumOS Cherry (a lightweight ChromeOS build; see http://chromeos.hexxeh.net) on the DT366.  Here's where I am with it for right now:

Pros:
- Base OS image dd'd directly to 1GB USB drive and booted successfully.
- USB keyboard and mouse recognised and functional out of the box.

Cons:
- Extremely slow (approx. 20 minutes) to boot.  I suspect this is a combination of 256MB of RAM and USB 1.1.
- Display goes solid black about the time that X would be hands over from xdm (or equivalent) to the window manager
- No wireless support (Aironet) out of the box.
- No touchscreen support out of the box.
- No sound support out of the box.

To do:
- Install 1GB image on USB drive to SSD; hopefully this will improve boot times.
- Set up dev environment in VM.
- In dev environment: investigate feasibility of adding wireless, touchscreen, and sound support.*
- In dev environment: build 4GB image (i.e., from full source) for testing w/4GB SSDs.**

* I did some quick grepping of the ChromeOS source, and it looks like there *may* be a penmount driver in there.  I still need to verify this, but the exact phrase does appear in the source.

** I have a 4GB SSD, so can test this.

Basically, it looks like there may be some potential in making ChromeOS work.  Just the fact that it boots as far as it does is rather nice.

Also, please note that I am not placing a timeframe on or making any sort of commitment to tackling the issues mentioned above.  I'm busy, and have to be realistic about the fact that I can't afford to take on any more projects right now.  I'm mentioning them as a starting point for anyone else who may feel like running with this.
Last edited by casm on Fri Dec 18, 2009 12:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
quotaholic
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by quotaholic »

Looks like a how to popped up for compiling Android for the geode lx hardware

http://wiki.androidx86.org/index.php?ti ... processors

I am putting this up because of previous experiences I have had with ubuntu. Geode GX hardware has questionable support. After twenty minutes ubuntu 7.04 will boot but no success with newer releases. After not getting past the part that casm mentioned where the screen goes black about the time gdm would hand off to xorg I submitted a bug to the ubuntu team and they basically told me that the hardware was not supported. Having installed Jaunty on Geode LX based hardware I can say that it went well and was a decent improvement over the GX hardware. DT360 vs DT366.

Is Cherry Chrome ubuntu based? What is it exactly?

In order to qualify the platform for development it would be nice to know some of the basics that its built upon. I cant seem to find much in the faq or wiki. I suspect that to make something like this work on a DT366 will take a custom kernel then a compressed filesystem in live form. I just cant see everyone buying oem overpriced flash chips to fit a 4 gig os. Possibly I am wrong and googles os will be such a hit that the price of the chip will outweigh the next good looking netbook on sale.

Considering that the majority of the DT's out there have 500 gig drives 4gb may not be a worthy goal for finished file system size.
serialjoepsycho
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by serialjoepsycho »

I think it's debian based or it'sdebian compatible but I'm almost certain it's not ubuntu based.
casm
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by casm »

quotaholic wrote: Looks like a how to popped up for compiling Android for the geode lx hardware

http://wiki.androidx86.org/index.php?ti ... processors
Nice.  Thanks for that; once I get the remainder of the holiday stuff out of the way I'll look into it a bit more deeply.  At first glance it looks as though it's really only useful for CPU optimisations, though - we'll still be stuck with supporting the remainder of the hardware in the DT as a 'fun' exercise.
I am putting this up because of previous experiences I have had with ubuntu. Geode GX hardware has questionable support.
I can't speak for Ubuntu (I'm a FreeBSD / Slackware guy for the most part), but past experience with similar Geode-based devices seems to be that supporting the CPU is typically less of an issue than supporting all of the attendant items hanging off of it - which isn't really terribly surprising: embedded devices are notorious for having odd hardware combinations.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion at this point that on the DT366, XP Embedded is the way to go for hardware support and relative ease of deployment.  No Linux-based distribution I've tried thus far has even come close to what I've been able to achieve with Windows in terms of overall usability.
After twenty minutes ubuntu 7.04 will boot but no success with newer releases. After not getting past the part that casm mentioned where the screen goes black about the time gdm would hand off to xorg I submitted a bug to the ubuntu team and they basically told me that the hardware was not supported. Having installed Jaunty on Geode LX based hardware I can say that it went well and was a decent improvement over the GX hardware. DT360 vs DT366.
Interesting, because I've been able to get X running under one of the distributions (Slax, possibly) that I tried.  It wasn't great, but it did work minus touchscreen support.  My guess is that there isn't a driver specific to the WebDT's video chipset, but framebuffer / VESA mode does the trick.
Is Cherry Chrome ubuntu based? What is it exactly?
I would assume Ubuntu since that's the reference platform and build environment, but like I said, that's an assumption on my behalf.  I can't find anything in the CherryOS FAQ or blog that gives a definitive answer either.
In order to qualify the platform for development it would be nice to know some of the basics that its built upon. I cant seem to find much in the faq or wiki. I suspect that to make something like this work on a DT366 will take a custom kernel then a compressed filesystem in live form.
True, but if the driver support for the hardware isn't there to begin with, then the kernel's a moot point.  And given what we're running into with X supporting the video chipset, I'm guessing that this may well be the case.
I just cant see everyone buying oem overpriced flash chips to fit a 4 gig os. Possibly I am wrong and googles os will be such a hit that the price of the chip will outweigh the next good looking netbook on sale.
Agreed.  I bought mine specifically because I was experimenting with XP and wanted some elbow room for that that the 512MB SSD just didn't have - but it's generally not worth spending $100 on a 4GB SSD for a machine that can be had for that much.  By the time you've spent that much for the WebDT and the 4GB SSD, you're at around half the price of a touchscreen netbook.
Considering that the majority of the DT's out there have 500 gig drives 4gb may not be a worthy goal for finished file system size.
Good point.
Last edited by casm on Sun Dec 27, 2009 3:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
quotaholic
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

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From what someone on the LinuxMCE project told me Ubuntu may not work due to the way that HAL was written. The hint they gave me was user experience. Kinda like Apple only making osx for sse3 chips. It puts a bar up for hardware and sets a minimum for user experiences.

The touchscreen driver is the biggest limiting factor for us. While we can find penmount driver packages in various repo's for various distributions it takes penmounts calibration utility to make the screen usable. This utility comes with the drivers we download from their site but not the packages in the repo's.

Thats where my origin question came from on Cherry. In all cases I had to research xorg version vs kernel version and go shopping on penmounts download pages. This is largely why I have only made Slackware and Debian based images so far. All on penmount for supporting only the most mainstream of distributions in stead of patching their driver over to a kernel event. In more recent drivers I do see ev mentions so it may be in works.

Have not done much with Slackware lately as packages in 13 grew quite a bit in size. Mainly kernel and related modules. 437mb was my smallest install so far with a fluxbox gui and penmount driver installed. Although I was told by a Slackware maintainer that the "ACPI Atlas button controller kernel module" - "atlas_btn" was in Slackware 13. This was not in 12.2 or 12.0. I did not confirm presence on 13.

Heck I just broke my shoulder on xmas eve. Out of work and I may need to move again soon but until then I may have some time to lend to a cause. Learning blender now. I would love to learn how to build a distro like Slax or NimbleX. Persistent save in about 255mb would be ideal. Then we could make what we wanted. Puppy was cool but ...... just odd. That and I agree with Volkswagner, it was a little sluggish.

I agree with you on the Geode however there is at least one feature on the geodelx that I cant access currently like hardware accelerated video. Anytime I try x goes corrupted. This leaves me curious. Have to think its like owning an ATI card and that its partially kernel related. If I could get xbmc working on Slackware I would consider making a slack dev environment and trying to compress a file system to work on a DT. Just got enough storage to approach this idea.
serialjoepsycho
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by serialjoepsycho »

It's debian based
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/1 ... event.html

"Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that uses a lot of open-source software: Host AP Linux drivers, PAM (an authentication mechanism), Syslinux (a lightweight bootloader), IBus (Intelligent Input Bus for Linux / Unix OS), ConnMan (Internet connection manager), XScreenSaver and other software. More on this later."

or so says that info
casm
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by casm »

serialjoepsycho wrote: It's debian based
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/1 ... event.html
I'm not entirely certain about that.  According to http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/bui ... hromium-os , the supported build environment is "Ubuntu (Hardy 8.04 or newer, Karmic 9.10 recommended)".

Realistically you should be able to build it on any flavour of Linux, but given that Ubuntu seems to be the blessed distribution (and that the source and any attendant tools are likely dependent on those specific versions, given how precise they were in mentioning them by name and version), I'm leaning towards Ubuntu on this one.
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by serialjoepsycho »

Given what google is trying to do it leans it'll all up in the air. They want A and they want B. They want ease of use on par with windows. They want it to be safe and secure with large amounts of compatible hardware. They want it small. It could be ubuntu based but here's my thought process: Google has there own ubuntu distro that they use in house. If you have windows xp and you are coding your own linux and you can do it on xp easily then you will.I feel that google would have wrote as much of that from scratch as possible I feel they would have no benefit of using ubuntu over debian as far as fame as google's name and programming success provides enough fame. Google is a wide reaching company and will make more money off the use of chrome os than that of any licensing fees it can bring. I don't know but we'll see.
casm
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by casm »

serialjoepsycho wrote: It could be ubuntu based but here's my thought process: Google has there own ubuntu distro that they use in house.
I strongly doubt this.  They listed the requirements for setting up the build environment, and it uses two public releases of Ubuntu are specifically mentioned by name.  Why reinvent the wheel?
If you have windows xp and you are coding your own linux and you can do it on xp easily then you will.
This doesn't make sense.  If you were attempting to roll your own Linux distribution (which is what I think you're referring to), it would not make sense to do it from within Windows.
I feel that google would have wrote as much of that from scratch as possible
Again, I strongly doubt this - at least as far as the underlying OS goes.  There are definitely parts of Chrome that they created, but there's no point in reinventing the wheel where it's absolutely not necessary.
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Re: Google Chrome OS on DT366

Post by quotaholic »

Ubuntu is Debian based. If there were mentions of a debian based system and it was in fact built upon ubuntu then there would be no false information exchanged no?
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