22 October (r29835): Status area, about dialog

(Yes, I know this is two days ago, but I only had time to compile it, not write this until today. I should get the latest revision later today.)

One thing that's been bothering me was that the status area buttons (battery, network, and the ~main-menu button) wouldn't change at all on mouseover. Fortunately, they do now, and they look quite nice. The third main-menu button got a redesign and is now smaller. The battery button was switched to the left of the network one. Functionally, nothing has changed.

The about dialog got an interesting change: Chromium OS draws a custom border instead of using the standard Gtk one. However, this does not seem to be the case in the normal Chromium. Speculation: all dialogs will be like this, even the about, import, clear data, bookmarks manage and edit, and several other dialogs.

Also, I fixed some things with the diff that a while ago I (for some reason) thought were necessary when they were not. There now is no option to use the standard Gtk window decoration for the main window.

Download revision 29835: Extract the chromium-os-rxxxxx.tgz archive and run chromium-os. To get the many translations, extract chromium-os-i18n-rxxxxx.tgz and move the files to the locales/ folder. To get the HTML element inspector, extract chromium-os-inspector-rxxxxx.tgz and move the inspector/ folder to the resources/ folder (create it if necessary).

chromium-os-r29835.tgz (16.5mb)

chromium-os-i18n-r29835.tgz (1.4mb)

chromium-os-inspector-r29835.tgz (539.9kb)

r29835.diff (26.1kb)

17 October (r29376): Date and Time

This is the first of probably and hopefully many posts detailing Chromium OS changes, which I'll be summing incrementally. Instead of talking here about all the differences between Chromium OS and normal Chromium, I'll just point you to these two: http://sites.google.com/sites/randomlinuxnerd and http://livinginagoogleworld.blogspot.com/2009/10/chrome-os-browser-tour-possible-look-at.html This is a couple days newer than those two links.

This change brought two minor changes: 1) The menu shown by clicking the clock now has an option to "Open date and time options...", and 2) a Timezone selector in the options menu. Clicking the Timezone selector offers shows the many timezone options.

Some other changes: I don't know if it was this way before, but popup windows seem to open in new tabs instead of separate GtkWindows.

Download revision 29376: Extract the chromium-os-rxxxxx.tgz archive and run chromium-os. To get the many translations, extract chromium-os-i18n-rxxxxx.tgz and move the files to the locales/ folder. To get the HTML element inspector, extract chromium-os-inspector-rxxxxx.tgz and move the inspector/ folder to the resources/ folder (create it if necessary).

chromium-os-r29376.tgz (16.22mb)

chromium-os-i18n-r29376.tgz (1.37mb)

chromium-os-inspector-r29376.tgz (538kb)

r27396.diff (21.9kb)

About This Blog

In case you don't know, Google announced its Linux-based operating system, Chrome OS. Chrome is Google's 99% open source web browser. Chromium is its non-Google-branded, 100% open source counterpart. Any and all active development is done on Chromium. Changes will later be applied to the official, Google-branded Chrome.

Chrome OS will also be open source. The main area of the operating system is Chrome itself. Google includes the source code for the Chrome OS version of Chromium/Chrome in Chromium's version control. Changing some build system files and compiling the modified version allow you to have a version of Chromium, with Google's design for netbooks. Chromium OS is the unofficial version of Chrome OS.

I have compiled Chromium OS. (As far as I know, I was one of the first outside of Google to do so.) Chromium OS is under active, open source development. Being the Chrome fan that I am, I set up this blog to track Chromium OS development and news. I'll update my copy of Chromium OS and run it. I'll see what changes there are and take screenshots, and I'll post them on this blog. And very importantly, I'll share my copies of Chromium OS, so you can play with them too. I'll also share the changes I made to make Chromium OS compile, so A) you can hack on it too, and B) Google doesn't sue me for violating the license. :)

Final tally: 12(+1) Chromia, 9(+1) Chromes