According to the leaked document from Google, they are planning to release a Google branded netbook to be released in Quarter 4, 2010.

This is what I’ve been waiting for! The Google netbook will of course be running the Google Chrome OS and should be able to show it off in a fantastic light! The Chromebook will have a 10.1-inch TFT HD-ready multi-touch screen, 64GB SSD (no HDD), 2GB RAM, WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, Ethernet port, USB ports, webcam, 3.5mm audio jack and a multi-card reader!

Preinstalled Google Apps Maps, Gmail, Docs, Calender and Search by Voice (which I love!)

Talk of sub $300 (£200?) price tags? And talk of further subsidies through 3G network carriers… seems to be the way forward.

The Chromebook should be good for launch at the end of 2010 (holiday season!) Anyone know of any similar machines so we could hack an approximation together?

More info @ the IBT TImes.

I read about the unfortunate death of the Crunchpad last week and after I’d gotten over my initial sorrow for Mr. Michael Arrington, I swiftly moved on… forgot about the ill-fated, seemingly never to be realised project and turned my mind to thinking about the new Google OS for netbook, Chrome OS (AKA The Chromebook) – the eagerly awaited project (and no doubt much harder to derail than the Chrunchpad!)

The netbook operating system Google plan to launch next year does, on the face of it, sound like a very similar project to the Chrunchpad – proprietary linux build, promised boot time of less than 10 seconds, a device built of the web and for the web… with some apparent limitations: Fusion Garage have now slated the 11 Dec 2009 as the launch date for the new device, with a new name – somewhat bravely titled – The JooJoo.

The JooJoo is designed in part as a video viewing device, but unfortunately in the demo we got, the Wi-Fi network we were on wasn’t robust enough to support the video Rathakrishnan wanted to display. The few seconds of video we saw before the system stopped to buffer looked great, but if users buy this device expecting to be able to watch HD video in their hotel rooms all the time, we recommend that they either reset their expectations or avoid hotels like San Francisco’s St. Regis, which apparently doesn’t give its guests sufficient bandwidth.

More from the CNET Review here

I have no idea of the legalities of what will follow between Mr. Arrington and Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan, I for one though would urge them to solve whatever difficulties they have now though… before Google comes to the party and cleans up with a tablet version of the Chromebook.

Acer chairman, JT Wang, says he expects to be first to market with an official Chrome OS netbook (or to coin the phrase we here are hoping will become the norm, Chromebook!) in the second half of 2010 according to the DigiTimes.

Mr Wang says Acer has been working on a Chrome OS device since mid-2009 despite the poorer than expected demand for its dual-boot Android netbook, the Aspire One AOD250.

Even being Google isn’t enough to get the OS into a market dominating position on cheap ultra-portables. It’s worth pointing out that DigiTimes isn’t breaking anything new with the time-frame since the target for release Chrome OS build has been the second half of 2010 ever since the OS was announced.

As Endgadget points out… The timing doesn’t matter too much anyway, we bound to be seeing plenty of Chromium OS netbooks flooding the grey market long before the second half of 2010. Bring it on

Not wanting to put you off with the stark warning at the top of this page:

Warning: This page is for developers who both know how to build Chromium OS and aren’t afraid to take a screwdriver to their computer.

Google has released a hardware compatability list, including a Comments & Caveats section that describes known issues with given netbooks – seemlingly the most common thing not to work will be your WiFi.

Assuming that Google keep this page current, you can get the list of (almost) working netbooks here. The recent netbooks that seem to work across all four tests (Wifi, Ethernet, Trackpad, Suspend/Resume) are the ASUS Eee PC 1008HA and Toshiba Mini NB200/NB205. Some other models should work across three of the four tests, apart from Wi-Fi, where the module brand (Atheros/Broadcom) is unknown. These models are the Acer AOP531h, Acer AOD250, Acer Aspire One AOD250-1165, Gateway LT20 and Packard Bell DOT S.

Also, it’s worth noting :

Anyone signed into an @chromium.org address can modify this list. (If you don’t see an Add item button below, sign in. One way to get an @chromium.org address is to be a committer.) In the spirit of wiki, the community is encouraged to remove inaccurate or irreproducible results. Repeat offenders will suffer the wrath of the wiki gods.

So lets hope the Open Source Community can resist editing the list for financial gain, shouldn’t be too hard now… should it?

(I first spotted this on Netbook Choice… thanks!)

Some bright spark has compiled the code for Chrome OS and got the drivers et al together and working on a Dell Mini 10V.

If you have a Dell Mini 10v and would like to see the first version of Chrome OS running on your machine, you can download the USB image, from Dell.

Instructions

To copy onto an (8GB minimum) USB key, find another linux machine and utilize the “dd” command to put the image onto the USB key.

Example:

dd if=ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img of=/dev/sdb
In this example, /dev/sdb is my entire USB key… use “fdisk –l” to see how your USB key is named for your particular environment. Be careful to select your USB device (again, use fdisk –l to double verify and confirm the correct device filename) and not another device…

Some additional notes for the released image:

The user name to login is “dell”.The desktop login window will complete the user name by adding “@gmail.com” to the end The user password is “dell” The root password is set to “dell” I’ve included a script in /etc called “mount_rw.sh” to allow root
(or sudo) to remount the root partition for updates/changes/whatever
you like.

Here are the caveats:
It will take more than 5-10 *minutes* for the ChromiumOS network connection manager to “see” the access points and allow you to select and connect – be patient.

Wired connections appear to work fine and appear quick to connect.

There are currently issues with both the connection manager as well as the underlying components (wpa_supplicant) that can easily break or get hung. When in doubt, reboot and give it another try.

Use this image at your own risk – it comes to you totally unsupported and very minimally tested.

From Cromium OS Dev Google Groups

I don’t have access to a Dell Mini to test this out myself… if you do and you manage to get this running, please let me know how you get on in the comments here!

Yesteday, the good people of Google had an open-source release of the code (so far) for the Google Chrome OS. Google’s new web based operating system.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will colour it in over the course of the next year.

Here’s a video of the announcement.

I’ve been reading a lot about the new platform over the past few weeks and don’t mind admitting that I’m quite excited about getting my hands on a Chrome OS machine to play with. I’ve got a little Toshiba machine running Ubuntu which is pretty sweet but something tells me that when Google are ready to go then it’s all going to be a little bit slicker!