Why call it Chrome?

Quite recently Google released a netbook. Apparently they built it too! But what is more significant than the hardware (which quite frankly looks like a black-and-black movie) is that it runs the first release quality build of the Chrome OS.

The Chrome OS is a long running effort of Google to bring a new “Operating System” dedicated for netbooks. However it can be equally described as a really large framework for only webapps to run on a computer. Not that its a bad thing , but most people would not be convinced to buy a $500 netbook to find out that they cannot even store their entire movie collection in it!

The last point is more a critique of the Cr-48 netbook(that is its name!!). Clearly the Chrome netbook is for developers so it may not exactly be top-of-the-line with respect to the hardware specs. Anyway the significant hardware details are:

• 12.1-inch screen.
• Full size keyboard.
• Oversized clickpad.
• 3G chip
• 802.11n dual-band WiFi.
• 8+ hours of active use.
• 8+ days of standby.
• Webcam.
• 16GB Solid state drive
• Intel Pine Trail processor(do not know about the clock speed)
• 1GB of RAM

The hardware is pretty basic looking except for the keyboard. The keyboard is pretty awesome to look at(which is all I can do). The interesting thing about the keyboard is that is has got a Search Key(which brings up the new tab page) and a full screen key which switches the current tab(or application) to full screen.

Now that the hardware is dusted off let us look at the OS.

(Welcome to CHROME OS)

Usually with Google they usually release a good product, build on it in increments and make it a really great one (think Android,GMail,Search). But with Chrome OS they are trying to revolutionize people’s idea about what a netbook is. This OS is strictly a web-only OS in the sense that you cannot even login to your system unless you are connected to the internet. In the first boot of the device Chrome asks you for your preferred wi-fi network (unless of course you are hooked up via ethernet). Otherwise it will try to operate on the data plan from the 3G chip(clearly a no-no in India. No wonder you cant buy one from here). Then in about 3 seconds you would need to login to your Google account, or create one if you dont have an account (!). Then in another 10 seconds all your Google data would be pulled in and lo you are presented to your desktop.

Only problem is that there is no desktop. Its just a Chrome browser window that just wont minimize.You are presented with large icons which are basically shortcuts to web applications like GMail, Google Talk, Google Docs , Youtube and so on. There is no “My Computer” or “My Documents” and the “old” stuff like that. People who are used to installing games and applications on their PC would just have to live with the Chrome extensions as of now. Google promises that there will be a large collection of applications in the future.

The entire OS is linux-based but the only revealing detail is the GNOME file browser which pops up whenever you want to save a document from your mail.  But the problem with the file manager is that when you use a pen drive or memory card you cannot backup its contents to the local storage (i.e the file manager does not show up). Instead you can only sync it online with some online storage sties.Similarly you can just play your songs from an external device, you cannot save them to the hard disk. (maybe to discourage that Cr-48 has only 16GB SSD).

Again other linux-specific features are completely hidden. Like the terminal,access to the root folder and so on. Clearly this netbook is for those users who are always on the move and are net-centered.

But the platform also has its upside. For example since all the work you do is cloud based, the documents you are working on(on Google docs) or the pictures you are editing (on PIKNIK) are always saved in the cloud. So incase you need to switch to another computer or if your netbook gets lost you really lose no data. Another cool feature is that you can ompletely replicate you Chrome OS experience on another machine. You need to enable a sync feature (from options->settings) on the Chrome OS. Once you are on another machine (which is running the Google Chrome Web Browser) all you need to do is sync back by signing into your account and lo all your bookmarks and applications are available.

Speaking of applications, all of the available apps are obviously web-apps. You need to install a specific app to suit your needs. For that you could do a Google Search (duh!) or use the Chrome Web Store.Clicking on the Web store shortcut takes you to a very Anroid Market like site from which you can install applications that are necessary.These apps can be placed in the bookmarks section, so that they will be automatically synced to your Google Account.So if you want to play a song or a movie you would have to use the in-built basic player or use one of the apps available.

(Chrome Web-Store from my laptop: https://chrome.google.com/webstore)

But the major problems with the platform is its overall performance. While it blazes away in most places the problems come when viewing flash heavy sites. The initial beta which I used couldnt play online flash videos and the recently released netbook flash seems really sluggish. Also there isnt a way to print out the documents you have created without using Google’s Air Print service(which is still in beta).

(Here is a youtube video about the basics of the OS)

This OS is like a kick to the traditional idea about OPERATING SYSTEMS.Overall the concept seems really innovative and we might have to wait and watch to see what happens.All the gripes about the OS are due to its heavy dependency on the cloud. But hey, if Google thinks its the way to go I guess they have a reason. Hopefully they will come up with more solutions than problems in the future.

(OH yeah please do remain calm)

A More beautiful web? Internet Explorer 9

Just a few weeks for the Internet Explorer 9 to go public. As of now it is the test drive version that people are working with. Well it should give a fairly accurate representation of how the final product would be, right?!

First the bullet points

• IE9 obviously is the 9th iteration in Microsoft’s proprietary internet browser for the Windows platform.
• IE9 requires Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7…sorry XP users you are stuck with IE8
• IE9 supposedly is a huge step from Microsoft to move towards W3 web standards (more on that later)
• It is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Now to my opinion of IE9. IE9 sure looks like a complete overhaul of the series. (looks like Microsoft are doing a lot of overhauling these days). The browser window looks very different from any of the previous versions. The first striking aspect is the address box and the tab listing appear in one single line.

Oh wait its called the “One Box” not the address box any more because you can also simply search for keywords by typing there. The search provider will be retained from your previous version of internet explorer. However the “one Box” is kind of strange. if your keyword is quite short or related to a famous brand instead of showing search results IE9 directly takes you to a related site of that keyword. Sometimes it would just display the matching search terms (aka what I would’ve expected). Its difficult for me to predict what sort of an algorithm is being used here and it is difficult to assess whether it would make the user’s browsing experience simpler.

(On entering the search keyword microsoft-Chrome vs IE9)

IE9 would retain your previous IE’s configurations such as home pages , favorites and so on. But the “about:tabs” page has been modified to look similar to that of the WebKit browser’s. The page contains tiles of the pages you have visited recently along with information on how often you have visited it. But the tiles are a bit disappointing as it simply has a logo of the webpage in the corner instead of the webpage’s thumbnail.

Other significant UI changes are quite subtle. Maybe the large back button would be the only one that sticks out. Microsoft claims that IE9 is aimed at making the user concentrate on the web content rather than the browser itself. There are icons on the right of the browser to perform your regular tasks and configure certain settings.(not very different from Google Chrome or Safari).

The new download manager seems to more subdued as it is present meekly at the bottom of the screen.

More significantly there has been lots of effort put under the hood to make the browser compete with the others in terms of a web standards aspect. For eg., IE9 now supports HTML5 encoding natively without having to install Chrome frame. It also passes the Acid3 test with flying colors. It has a score of 95/100 which significantly is more than the Acid3 scores of IE6 IE& and IE8 put together. It has a faster Java script engine which means that web developers need not include specific IE optimization code into their websites. Almost all web pages are rendered almost perfectly. (Check out the sample provided at IE9’s webpage). The compatibility view option of IE8 seems to be bought under the hood in IE9. Users no longer have to think about any badly rendered sites due to incompatibility.IE9 also has better tab management-it is much easier and fun to re-arrange tabs. New tabs open pretty quickly and the eye-candy of breakaway tabs is also present(Chrome-like).

(IE9 supports HTML5 yay!)

IE9 also plays good with the other Microsoft software you might be running on your PC  like Messenger, Outlook and so on(say for example it highlights recent activities of your Messenger friends on a particular site) . It also retains many of the important features of previous editions of IE like the In-Private browsing, pressing ALT to bring down “advanced” menus and so on.

(Windows 7 taskbar shortcut context menu)

It is quite obvious that IE9 is built with Windows 7 in mind. Like IE8 you can pin a shortcut of IE9 onto your Windows 7 task bar. Right clicking or swiping up on this shortcut would provide you with a Windows 7 context menu for IE9 like frequent sites,tasks and so on.There is this pretty neat option of pinning one of those thumbnails in the New Tab page onto your Start Menu. It seems to be a pretty good idea as users can quickly go to one of their favorite pages without opening up the browser. You could pin a torrent site to the start menu and immediately go to it with a single click.

And there comes a little snag in IE9. It could be because it is a pre-release version but I seem to have problems in downloading .torrent files. I didn’t have any such problem with IE8 or even other browsers like Firefox or Chrome. Also there is no status bar as such for the browser. Sometimes it is hard to notice whether a link I just clicked on is loading or not. Of course there is the occasional crash happening but this pre-release version seems to be more stable and usable than the previous full releases.

(WTH?)

This is probably the best version of IE yet and it seems that Microsoft has woken up to the browser battle after a long hibernation. Seems like they need Google or Apple to be at their heels all the time.’

Oh yeah the IE9 icon seems to have the lightest shade of blue yet. (Maybe because IE9 is the lightest IE out there??)

Download IE9 platform preview from here http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/downloads/Default.html

In case you don’t like it you can simply uninstall it from CONTROL PANEL and you would be reverted back to the default Internet Explorer for you OS.

Installing an OS from a pen drive

Well I have only installed two operating systems ever- Windows 7 and Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Installing a new operating system used to be an ordeal in the primitive times of CLI(Command line interface)…or so I have heard. But there should not be much trouble in installing the ones I had mentioned. Not much trouble provided that the installation medium is in working condition.

It is common knowledge that most of us (students at least) use only a pirated version of Windows, due to the inexorbitant rates of “Genuine Windows Software”. Also the linux distros are usually available free of cost in a .iso format for download from the internet. Hence if one wants to install a new OS (assuming it is one of these two) we would probably download a copy burn it to a CD/DVD and proceed from the optical disk. However what is most frustrating is that the optical disks are prone to getting scratched and hence we might be faced with the disaster of an installation falling flat midway through.

The easiest solution is to use a pen drive that is becoming so common these days. I’ll list out the steps for creating an installation medium in the form of a USB drive for both Windows and Ubuntu.

Note: It is advised that the pen drive used should have atleast 2GB free space in case of a Ubuntu installation and 4Gb for a Windows installation. (Also preferrable if it’s a completely new/formatted pen drive)

Although you can still use the remaining free space in the pen drive for your purpose it is best if you don’t. In case the pen drive is absolutely necessary just install the OS and format the pen drive later.

(1) Installing Windows (Vista and 7 only)

Method 1

1. Plug in your pen drive and format it if it has not been formatted already
2. Open command prompt as Administrator. i.e type cmd in the windows start menu search bar and right click on the first matching program->Run as Administrator->Continue
3. In the command prompt windows type DISKPART
4. Once the prompt changes to DISKPART> type in LIST DISK and try to identify your pen drive from the listed devices.

5. Assuming your disk is say Disk 1 proceed with the following commands

(In case you have not formatted before do the first 6 commands)

SELECT DISK 1

CLEAN

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

SELECT PARTITION 1

ACTIVE

FORMAT FS=NTFS

6. Once the formatting is complete type these two commands.

ASSIGN

EXIT

Now you’ll be back to your default prompt

7. Now the actual job. Insert the Windows DVD into the DVD drive. Now in case you have only an ISO file don’t panic. Use a virtual drive manager program like POWER ISO or DAEMON Tools and mount the ISO file. (Should be pretty straight forward Open Power ISO –> Virtual Disk Manager->Mount Image-> Browse to your iso file and similarly for Daemon tools)

Note down the drive letter of the DVD/the mounted ISO file. Lets assume its G:\

Note down the drive letter of the pen drive too (Lets assume its H:\)

8. Now two more commands

G: CD BOOT

CD BOOT

(basically you are changing the current working directory to G:\BOOT)

9 . Now to prep your pen drive you need to make sure the BOOTMGR of Windows is hardcoded onto the pen drive so that the BIOS will recognize it as a boot-up disk . For that type

BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H:

10. Once all the above steps are completed simply copy all the contents from the cd to the pen drive.

(You can use the GUI for this….or simply use the COPY command in the CMD)

11. Done.You can now simply plug in the pen drive to the system where you would like to install the OS and boot it up. Make sure that the boot priority in the BIOS is USB. (Usually the USB drive will be checked before the hard disk so I guess for most motherboards there is no need to change anything)

And lo the installation will begin from where you can simply follow the GUI.

In case there seems to be any problem try repeating the steps all over.

NOTE: Why doesn’t this work on XP, coz in XP CMD the Pen drive doesn’t get detected and any hardcoding on the pendrive is not possible

Method 2

• In this method you can simply use a tool from the Microsoft Store. I have not had much success with this when I tried with a pirated ISO file but the tool sure worked when I tried with the Windows 7 Beta ISO file I got a while ago.

1. Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool and install it.



2. Run the program, browse to your Windows 7 ISO image using the Browse button.



3. In this step, you need to select your media type. As we are here to create a bootable USB, simply click on USB device button.



4. Select your USB flash drive from the drop down box and click on Begin copying button.



5. The Windows 7 USB/DVD tool will take a few minutes to complete the procedure.

And that’s its.

(2) Installing Ubuntu:

The GUI method is so good that I have never even tried any other method. Creating a USB startup disk using this tool is really simple and easy.

Make sure you have a pen drive with atleast 2 GB of space and of course the Ubuntu ISO file.

(In Windows)

• If you are using windows and would want to create a USB startup disk for Ubuntu Download the Universal USB Installer.
• Run the tool and accept any terms and conditions.
• From the drop down list select the version of Ubuntu you have and would like to install.

• Browse the ISO file in your file system

• Choose the drive letter of your pen drive from the drop down list.

• Now you can either choose the pen drive to be persistent or not.

Persistence means that in case you use this pen drive simply as a “live cd” whatever changes you made in a session would be save as an image in your pen drive. So you need not have “fresh live sessions” every time you use this pen drive as a “live cd”

• Click on Create and let the tool do its magic.
• Once done you can use this pen drive to install Ubuntu on any machine.

(In Ubuntu)

• In most of the recent Ubuntu distros there is an inbuilt tool called Startup Disk Creator

• In the main menu, go to System > Administration and open ‘Startup Disk Creator’
• Click ‘Other’ to choose the downloaded ISO file

• Locate the ISO file in your Ubuntu File system
• Select the USB stick in the bottom box and click ‘Make Startup Disk’

• Wait for the process to finish and you have got your bootable pen drive.

OTHER REASONS FOR USING A USB INTALLER:

Besides being a more secure and convenient device there are few more reasons for having a pen drive as an installation device :

• Faster installation : This is because flash devices have greater read speeds than optical disks and so your task will only go ahead that much faster.
• Reuse of medium : This is quite a generic reason. You can use the pen drive in which you have your windows or linux installer to store other stuff you might have. (I however do not recommend it).
• Its just cooler isnt it